PRINTING THE IMAGE - SMORGASBORD EDITION
Perhaps it was avoidance behavior given how frustrating our last printing session went (and how seemingly bad the prints looked), or perhaps it was just laziness, but it had been a long while since we’d printed anything. The reality was that, at one point a couple of weeks ago Ann looked at the images I was so unsure about from our last printing session and concluded that there wasn’t the drastic color shift I’d thought had happened (neither in my images or hers). The odd colors were in the original image, though much less visible on a monitor than in a print. They were the result of us photographing in the transition periods of the day where the color of light is odd (cameras don’t necessarily do a good job of rendering accurate colors in unusual lighting conditions), and/or we’d spend too long in front of the monitor with the images (after about 15 minutes the eye/brain naturally adjusts to minor and even relatively drastic color temperature errors to “see” the colors accurately - that’s why you should walk away from your monitor every 15 minutes or so when developing an image to let the eyes readjust). The result was that we hadn’t corrected the color cast. All that to say that the prints were not as bad as we’d initially thought and we’d learned a lesson to always check to see if our eyes are compensating for wrong color temperatures. In other words, even if you think you’re done, go do something else for a bit and then return to look at the image and be wary of odd color shifts. Prints have a way of revealing things that don’t appear on a computer monitor.
Still, the result of our avoidance behavior had been 3 months away from the printer and the fear that the print heads may be damaged. Fortunately, after a good print head cleaning and testing, nothing was clogged and we could get to work.
It took a bit of motivation to get us back to looking at images. Look at your own images too long and everything starts to look like crap. Even material you had previously liked. I think that’s why it’s so important to steadily get out to photograph - which we have not done for going on 2 years now. Strange as it may sound, having a steady flow of new images to review and work on makes it easier to work on older images as well. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but COVID put a big dent into how our life her has developed and we just have not found our groove yet. The bimobil can’t come soon enough (due to be completed sometime between late February and early March 2022). We look forward to returning to the pattern of traveling and photographing we’ve so come to enjoy. Whether it’s for weekend jaunts, week-long trips or multi-week adventures, we’ll have our rig to get us out and to provide us shelter where we want it.
Anyway, last week we bit the bullet and started looking for images. It was a bit easier for me because (spoiler alert) Ann has been working on revamping our website (which might force us to update the images on it . . . other than the images posted on the blog, all of the gallery images are a bit dated). I arrived upstairs one morning (to top-off Ann’s coffee cup) to see an image from the Hoh Rainforest I’d forgotten about that I had previously wanted to work on in Capture One. Which led me to thinking about preparing a written catalog of our trips/photography sessions (unlike Lightroom, Capture One does not like one super, ginormous catalog, which means I have catalogs broken down by year, which makes it hard to find [nevertheless remember] images when you’ve been to places over different years). That led me to finding a few more images I’d never gotten around to developing. And once I started working on images, I started playing/experimenting . . . because that’s how you learn and get better.
Ann, on the other hand, had a harder time selecting images. She wound up narrowing her search to our last big trip and, in the end, selected some lovely images that were definitely worth working on.
For her first image Ann cheated (well, I call it cheating) a bit by returning to an image she had previously printed on a range of other papers as a test image to learn the differences between the various papers. This time we were sticking with our standby Red River Palo Duro Soft Gloss Rag and Ann focused on trying to pull out the white streaks in the background rocks to visually balance with the foreground white tree. She also decided she needed to enhance the separation between the vegetation in the mid-height area of the image.
Overall, the image is more dynamic than the one used for her test prints. It’s actually a great example of the iterative process of working with images. Sometimes you have to go through the process to see things you didn’t previously appreciate, or to correct deficiencies you were not previously aware of. Then, of course, there are times where you have drastically different visions of what an image can, or should be. Call it the evolving photographer’s interpretation of the image. In any event, the print is almost alive.
Ann’s second image was also from our visit to Zion NP. I said it before and I’ll say it again, for such a stunningly beautiful and awe-inspiring place, it is hard to make an excellent photograph there. The image invariably pales in comparison to the experience of the place. As a result, Ann asked me what I would do with this image (well, the undeveloped image) and we spent quite some time discussing various aspects of the image as well as how one might enhance them to improve the print viewer’s experience.
Again, we’re confronted with the fact that a print is not a monitor and can convey things not readily apparent in a monitor. In this case, for the better. One of the things we discussed is trying to incorporate the sense of depth and space underneath the front tree as it crosses the field and then hits the rear trees and the canyon walls. It’s barely perceptible on a monitor, but it is oh so lovely in the print! You can feel the openness behind the downed tree, and then it sweeps upwards behind the standing tree in the foreground, to flow off to the right to the far canyon wall. It’s a deceptively simple image that reinforces why one should print their images.
The last of Ann’s images comes from our unexpectedly delightful overnight stop in the middle of nowhere by Lake Powell. As happens in instances such as these (face it, we’re no more than a few dozens of feet apart and it’s obvious when something stunning is happening . . . so we’re often looking at and photographing the same thing) Ann and I have somewhat similar images. But as is also the case, even if there are similarities, there are real differences between the images we make, which reflect the way we see things. In this case, as is often the case, it’s a question of cropping (we used different focal length lenses) with me concentrating more on the butte, and Ann on the landscape. This is no more evident than the beautifully lit foreground grasses that invite you into the frame of Ann’s image, grasses that are totally absent in mine.
We will return to this place! A place that is nothing much in the blaring light of the day, but comes to life during the transitions between light and dark.
Unfortunately, as is the case when trying to polish your craft, not everything turned out perfectly. All of Ann’s images were a tad dark (and despite that, still had the wonderful qualities described above). In the midst of our previous printing session frustration and the fact that there were software updates (and ownership changes) to our monitor calibrating device, with one of the websites Ann consults (she does most of the technical leg work on the technical issues concerning monitor calibrations) also recommending changing some settings, Ann was a bit more bold than I was in making setting changes and paid the price for it. As in the wet darkroom, one way of knowing you’re got the right exposure is to go too far so you know both what is too little and is too much exposure. Now Ann has to tweak things a bit more, which will probably mean another printing session to confirm she’s got it right, to return to normal. It’s all part of the learning process.
While I had worked on that Hoh Rainforest image I saw on Ann’s computer, I didn’t print it this weekend. That will have to wait until another day, which means another blog post. Instead, I printed several of the images that made me stop when I was doing my cataloging. Like Ann’s images, two of mine came from our last big trip, although not from the main part of the vacation. If you recall, we started off with a half-day drive and spent the night in the Painted Hills. To be honest, that’s probably the place I miss the most being here in Portugal (well, that and our old house . . . and taking trips in Beast . . . and American breakfast sausage . . . and Black Butte Porter).
We arrived at the Painted Hills as the sun was setting and Ann and I did a bit of scouting (and off-the-cuff shooting that turned out ok). This image came from later the next morning just before we took off to continue our trip. As Charlie Waite puts it, “Who can resist a lone tree?” I’d developed another variation of this tree from that day (as well as one of it from the afternoon wandering), a tighter crop that I wound up developing in Black&White. As I looked at the catalog of images from that day, I realized that the cropped version really lost an elegant fork of light that adds to the image. Also, the black and white version deprived the image of that warm/cool color effect of the sunlight and shadow areas of the image (not to mention the blue sky) that I’m increasingly learning to appreciate. Again, thanks Charlie for opening my eyes.
The print has the lovely morning glow on the tree and grasses that appears on the monitor. It seems that my monitor calibration settings were just fine, unlike Ann’s unfortunate experience.
My next image was from earlier in the morning. It’s a simple composition full of colors, textures and forms. I’d learned my lesson from the pre-dawn images that had given me so much heartburn in June and shifted the color temperature quite a bit, removing much, but not all, of the reddish, pre-dawn cast from the image. The grasses now look more yellow, as they should, with just a hint of that rose color you get out at the Painted Hills as night creeps towards morning.
I also tried applying a technique we picked up from a recent video of Joe Cornish talking about developing images and selectively applied clarity and structure enhancements to parts of the image I want the eye to rest upon and avoiding other areas where it’s not helpful to draw the viewer’s attention to. It’s easy to go overboard with some of these tools, so having a light hand is an acquired skill that takes a bit of practice. So practice I did.
The two other images I worked on are from way back in 2014 from one of our trips to Pinard Falls. Here, I decided to develop the images in Black&White. My thinking here was to not simply crank up the contrast to get dark-darks and white-whites, but to instead really try to see if I can get rich mid-tones with black and white images from our printer.
The first image was of the entire falls and I had to try and balance out the admittedly overexposed water on the upper area (very light because it was facing the sky) and the darker areas where the falls meet the creek. And while I was able to get some texture from some parts of the waterfall, other areas were definitely over-exposed, meaning there is no information (read: texture) in the water. Fortunately, the pure white areas are fairly small on the print, so it doesn’t distract from the image too much.
I’m very pleased with the print because it has more deep shadow detail than the image on-screen. Not only does it better show the subtle grey tonal differences, the bright spots (rocks) do not appear as contrasty as they do on a monitor and, most importantly, there is a 3-dimensional quality to the image in the print that isn’t fully there on the screen. There is truly something special when you get that effect in a print.
The same can’t be said about the second of the two images, the detail shot. Here, the print seems less than on screen. The print seems ever so slightly light, which causes the image to loose its visual depth. If this were the darkroom, I would say that I probably selected the wrong exposure time from the test strip. There, one second exposure time (over 20-30 seconds) would be the difference between superb and not-quite. This image wound up in the “not-quite” category. Perhaps I should have gone too-far, and then pulled back a bit. (Spoiler alert: I’ve already made the adjustments in the image below.)
When developing images it’s all about decision-making. What to do, how much to do it and knowing when to stop. It’s a skill that you have to develop, both in technique and judgment. This is even more so now that we have so many tools available with our computers. That’s why it’s so important to continue developing images and learning what works, and what doesn’t. And printing our images, because you’ll see things that you missed before and come to understand when and how to push an image. I forgot where I read it, but one photographer said that you can have an image that looks good on screen that comes across poorly in a print. But if you have an image that is good as a print, it is inevitably good on screen.
I guess I have (quite) a bit more practice to do.