Printing the Image - The Beginning
A week or so ago I was listening to a writer on NPR. She was discussing how she crafted stories and explained that she has to figure out the ending of the story before she could really move forward with the writing. Once she had the ending, then everything else seemed to fall into place.
I’m just the opposite. I have to begin at the beginning.
If you think about it, that last sentence sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Or perhaps The Wizard of Oz. Or even something Yogi Berra would say. I guess it depends on your personal experiences and preferences on which is the more appropriate characterization. Personally, it makes me think of Begin the Begin, the first song on REM’s fourth album Life’s Rich Pageant. But I digress . . . .
When it comes to writing blog posts, I have to start with the beginning. And often it’s not even the beginning of the post itself, it’s the title. I have to get the title right, otherwise I muddle about with the blog post in my mind. When I start writing before I have a title, I usually wind up worrying about what the title will be and don’t make a lot of progress until I have that resolved. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) It’s the beginning, whether the title or the first few lines of a post, where the concept of the story coalesces in my mind. And once the concept is resolved, I’ve still got to begin at the beginning. At times it’s a pretty easy process where it’s obvious what the title should be, or a title pops immediately into my mind that then quickly formulates my thinking into a key sentence or two. And then I’m off to the races. Other times, not so much. This time was one of those not so much times - it took me several days of thinking to find just the right title. And like so many things in life, I have to thank Ann because she resolved my dilemma.
If you’ll pardon the pun, let’s begin at the beginning. I’m starting a new “series” of blog posts. Much like the Dan’s Cameras series (that has been dormant for awhile, but the premise for that series is that I have to buy a new camera to have a new entry, and I like mine just fine right now thank you very much . . . then again, have I done my latest camera?), or the Shooting the Shooter series, this series will follow a common theme, and be identifiable by the title. I’d been thinking of a range of titles for it, but none of them seemed right, and that left me frustrated because I couldn’t think deeper about the types of things that I’d write about in the series until I had that title. So as I explained the concept to Ann the other evening over dinner, as well as my feeble attempts at titles, Ann said, “Why don’t you call it ‘Printing the Image?’” So that’s the title of the new series - Printing the Image.
As many of you know, Ann and I bought ourselves a photo printer for Christmas. A serious photo printer (and if you measure “serious” by weight - this one is SERIOUS) that cost the price of a good photographic lens (or a used car . . . well, not quite). A printer that, much like our cameras, gives us no excuses for not producing great results. However, just like our cameras, there is a learning curve. Given my experience in the wet darkroom, I knew that mastering printing was going to take quite some effort. I also knew that developing the skills to go from 80% of what the equipment can do to 95% of what the equipment can do will take a tremendous amount of work. And to draw 98% - exponentially more. And to 99% - exponentially more so. How to put it? After three months, we’re still working at it.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few months working our way through basic settings and developing the ability to make good, if not great, prints. We’ve calibrated our monitors, downloaded ICC profiles for our printer-ink-paper combinations, and learned (and keep trying to remember) all the different settings we need to adjust to successfully soft-proof the image in Lightroom and then to adjust the printer to produce what we’re wanting. Then there’s the whole notion of trying to get a feel for (and hopefully wind up settling on only one or two) the different types of paper - glossy, matte, photo, fine art . . . . And most importantly, developing a feel for how to make a print, which looks distinctively different than a screen projection (reflected light has a lot less dynamic range than any type of illuminated device, be it your phone, iPad or computer monitor), have the impact I felt when I made the image. Let’s just say that I’ve quickly recognized that soft proofing can only take you so far. We have a ways, a very long ways, to go before I would say we’re technically competent. Right now we’re benefitting from the wonders of technology (really, pretty much any camera out there will produce outstanding photographs [at least technically] despite the photographer’s best intentions - printers are the same, they do the initial heavy lifting quire well).
Simply put, there are incredible advantages to today’s technology. In addition to producing decent results somewhat easily, your hands don’t smell like fixer; you don’t spend hours in the darkroom to get a single print that may or may not be good; and we can print in color. Sometimes you even get to pull up an image in Lightroom, make a couple of quick adjustments in soft-proofing mode, and send the image to the printer to get a fantastic print - all in the time it would have taken me just to set up the wet darkroom. Maybe not perfect, but leagues ahead of what you would get from anything but a custom print from a professional printing lab. But getting such instantaneous results rarely happens and occasionally, things are so haywire you’ve got to take a step back and figure out what the heck is wrong.
And then there’s the issue that we don’t want pretty good prints, we want excellent prints. That will take time and a lot of effort (which means a lot of paper and ink and their corresponding costs). There are no short cuts - see the “exponential” comments above. We’ve just got to put in the serious work to get there.
So now we get to the meat of the new series. One of the similarities between printing today and in the old days is time. It used to be that you mixed up a batch of chemicals and you were on a clock - they would degrade and after a certain point, would yield less than excellent results, so you’d have to use them or dump them out. It was motivation to print frequently once you had chemicals mixed. Today, we’re in a somewhat similar boat. If we don’t print fairly frequently, the printer head will clog with ink. Given that a replacement head is about $600, we definitely don’t want that to happen. Actually, one of the primary factors for going with the printer we did as opposed to its equally outstanding competitor, was the fact that the one we chose tends to clog less often (and the competitor significantly more often), and we can replace our own head (not literally!) so we wouldn't have to ship our machine off to the shop if our head did clog.
How often do we have to print? Roughly every two weeks. Potentially we could go to four, but two is safe and we’ve generally kept to that. Strange as it may seem, when we’re home, life loves to get in the way, and sometimes it’s hard to carve out even a couple of hours of time to really focus on making a good print every couple of weeks. But we have our “excuse” to carve out that time - gotta protect the head! So we will be printing at least every couple of weeks.
I thought about it and decided that I should do a blog post each time I print, to show you at least one image I print during a printing session (we tend to keep it to only a couple at most now - we went haywire the first day we printed, - you just have to give into the joy of seeing prints for the first time, but have now settled on quality over quantity). I hope to convince Ann to let me show you her image as well. But you know her, she’s less inclined to throw things out there for others to laugh at than I am. Anyway, much like other posts that I write, it’s a reason for me to think more about the image, what worked and didn’t, why I’ve selected the image I have, why I made the decisions I did in making and processing the image. In other words, it’s an excuse to push myself farther than I would have otherwise in the hope that it will improve my photographic thinking and ultimately, my photography. You know, it is all about me.
So here was the last image I printed, unfortunately not so successfully. I made it during our first visit to the Alabama Hills east of Mt. Whitney. A pre-dawn image of a tree we’d scouted out the day before.
One thing you should know is that we aren’t (well, I’m not) necessarily selecting my favorite images to print at this stage (although I love this one). I’ve been selecting images to see how certain types of images print, as well as exploring the range and capability of our printer, in both black and white and in color. Same for the different paper samples we’ve gotten. So, for example, I picked this image because it has a delicate range of pinkish-blue indirect morning light and a sense depth that I knew, if I could capture in print, would be getting me closer to my goal of mastering printing. I’ve developed the skills to be able to bring it out on my calibrated monitors (if the above image looks a bit light or washed out, you’ve probably got your monitor brightness at too high a level - most people do), and my goal is to be able to do the same on a print.
As for the print, I’m not there yet. First I printed it on a matte fine art paper, the first one we’ve tried, because we were experimenting with papers. After making a couple of tweaks and prints, I was still less than totally satisfied with the result (the blacks, as we’ve read, aren’t as strong on matte papers). I then switched over to a Baryta paper I liked on other prints we’d made. Naturally (given the way things were going that day), the first baryta print came out totally crappy, which left my head scratching. It took me a while but I figured out that I forgot to adjust the printer settings, to include switching over to glossy black ink instead of matte black ink, when I switched paper types. Duh! At least it wasn’t the totally goofy colors I’d gotten on some images before - that led me to discovering that somehow we’d loaded the wrong print driver on my machine (prints came out fine from Ann’s machine). Like I said, we’re still learning the ins-and-outs of the printing process.
Well, my final print of the above image was better, but seemed too light. Like darkroom prints, inkjet prints will darken as they dry, so I called it a day. The next morning the image looked a bit better, but the shadows lacked the punch of the image above, and there was no sense of space and depth. Plus the image may be a shade too light. From my days in the darkroom, I knew that if my print exposure was more than 5% off (1 second on a 20 second print exposure), the print would look wrong. And if I didn’t compensate for the dry-down factor (3% for my beloved Oriental Seagull photo paper developed in Dektol, or even better, Zone VI Studios print developer), the dry print would look wrong. I’m learning that the same is true for digital and inkjet printing - everything has to be just right, or the image loses any quality of light, and often of space. In this case, I think the prints needed to be a bit darker, and have a bit more contrast to deepen the shadow areas even more. I may even need to burn the shadows a bit to make it work. On the bright side of things, I learned that this definitely is not the type of image you want to print on matte paper. You need it to glow, not suck up the light.
Anyway, apologies for the long post, but you’ll be seeing more of these to come. And Hey! This weekend is a printing weekend, so you’ll get to see another image sooner rather than later!
And finally, last weekend Ann and I went on our March adventure! I’m just starting to work through those images, but a couple of posts should follow in the not-to-distant future. As for where we went, I’ll leave you with the following hint - Beast had sprung a leak during our Redwoods trip and in the grand tradition of never wasting a trip to Fresno, we headed down there a day earlier than we could have.