Printing the Image - 2018.05.27 - Old Abstracts

It was another printing weekend and, for once, Ann and I were able to take our time and make a variety of prints at a variety of sizes.  Ann focused on developing some images from more recent work, printing two images from our recent trip to the Japanese Gardens and one image taken earlier this year at the Painted Hills.  They were all lovely.  Me, well I did the opposite and went about as far back as I could go (at least digitally) and worked on some images I made in 2009.  The reasons why will be pretty obvious.

I’ve been thinking of a project lately and wanted to see how the images would convey in print, as opposed to on the screen.  The differences can be amazing at times - much like the difference between looking at slides versus prints in the old days - and I wasn’t sure how the images might look.  The only way to tell is to make a print and find out.  However, I wasn’t quite ready to print the latest images so I decided to use one from years back that had much of the same qualities as the current collection.  I’d been keeping that older image in collections of images worth revisiting (and printing), so now it was time to do that.  I also asked myself, “Why stop at one?” so I went back to the files and pulled a couple more images from that day to work on and, more particularly, to see just what kind of qualities I can get from ink jet printing.  

Before I get to the actual images, it’s worth telling the story behind them, because there is a story (though not quite as good as the story from the same location many, many years before these were taken, but I’ll let Len tell you about his icy dip).  

In 2009 I’d started photographing seriously again after a near 15-year break.  The world had changed from film to digital (although I hadn’t fully appreciated it at the time I started back up again), and the dive back in was excruciatingly painful given the level of work I’d been doing previously when working in large format and the quality of the images (or lack thereof) I was making in 2009.  Let’s just say it took quite a while before I regained my photographic sea legs.  But as photography is wont to do, it offered me  a taste of what lies out there if I persisted in my efforts.

In October of that year, during one of our all-too-infrequent trips back east, Ann and I made a trip to Cunningham Falls, MD.  It was one of the first of our trips out for me to photograph and Ann to just enjoy the hike and the environment.  A precursor of our present adventures where we're both photographing, but back then there were no 3:00 am wakeup calls and a lot more grumbling about my results.  

We hiked to the falls and, once we were there, I did what I do which is climbed the rocks upward, taking photographs as I went along (none of which are worth showing).  As I reached the top, I made several photographs of the creek and surrounding rocks (again, none of which are worth showing) and a pool the creek ran into.  Then I made the image immediately below.  

Now, I didn’t print this image, but it led to the images I did print.

As I started trying to make images that incorporated a bit of the surrounding landscape, I came across this combination trying to incorporate the reflection of the fall colors in the water along with the creek and tree.  As I looked at the above image on the LCD screen (a definite leap forward from the film days), I realized that what was happening in the water was way more interesting than anything else I’d been photographing all day.  So I started looking downward and only downward (where have we heard that one before?).

Fortunately, my shutter speed was set such that it produced an amazing texture in the water - 1/15th of a second.  Unlike now, where I know enough to vary shutter speeds to see what happens, back then I had yet to (re-)realize how important that could be.  But luck was on my side and my settings let me experiment in ways I hadn’t even thought of before.  

Thus, the first of the images I printed this weekend:

Much as I did on the Santiam River recently, I moved around the pool that gave me the wonderful reflections in order to see what different colors of trees and sky combinations would yield.  Some trees were orange, others were more of a yellow, with remnant green leaves still on them.  The skies had distinct clouds so parts were blue, others white.  So the second print I made has a slightly different color palette than the first.

I made a handful of different shots that day, really quite unsure of whether they would work.  Interestingly though, my latter images started incorporating more distinct features in them.  I started to do subconsciously what I now do consciously with compositions - the keeping one foot in reality thing.  Thus the last image I printed one sees a rock off to an edge, clear reflections of tree trunks within the splashes of color and, if one looks carefully, the subsurface rocks at the bottom of the pool on the bottom left.

It was another couple of years before I made more images worth looking at (although it wasn’t for lack of trying - a lot of close efforts, but all falling quite a bit short), and yet another couple of years after that before I started producing images that I’m not embarrassed to show.  In many ways, these images tell so many stories of the things to come and much of what guides my work today.  

They were well worth revisiting and definitely worth printing!