Printing the Image - 2018.10.28 Aspens
Ann and I are still recovering from our 2018 Grand Fall Adventure. And while I managed to make time to watch El Classico (Barcelona won 5-1 - even without Leo Messi!), the weekend was a full one as Ann and I worked through our post-trip recovery checklist to get everything ready for our next adventure - whenever that winds up being. So after the camera cleanings, and Beast’s bath, and a quick visit over to mummy’s, the only thing that was left was to run a couple of prints through the printer and hope that having a 5-week break hadn’t clogged our printer head. Fortunately, it didn’t.
Ann has had some problems with converting the Fuji .RAF files to .DNG files (technical jargon that is probably meaningless to you, as it should be) following an update to both Lightroom and Iridient Developer, which meant that she had to process them in much smaller batches than she usually does. Which takes time. I guess the bright side of that was that she was forced to at least roughly skim each day’s images from our trip. Me? I’d done that anyway while processing (one day at a time - for the same reasons) last Monday. Plus, I’ve been thinking of the blog stories, which means I’ve been visually scanning my images anyway thinking about which ones help move a story along. Which all goes to say that when I mentioned to Ann that we really should run a couple of prints through the printer before we voted (Oregon is vote by mail - Please VOTE!) and started making dinner, we both had no problems thinking of an image from the trip we’d like to see in print form. Interestingly, we both selected images of aspen trees.
Ann chose an image from our stint on the Kaibab Plateau (yes fans of the Iron Druid series - that Kaibab Plateau). It was taken at the aptly named Quaking Aspen Canyon. We had found a grove of trees of varying ages (thus sizes) broken up with patches of grasses and decided that it would likely offer us a variety of options for image making. So we pulled over and made some photographs.
For the most part, the trees were well-past prime color, with many of the trees having already dropped their leaves. That was largely irrelevant for this image anyway because Ann says that it was the dark branches of this tree that caught her attention.
In working on the image, the less than ideal leaf color and the dark branches led her to convert the image to black and white. Which is an excellent choice because it further emphasized the contrast between the dark branches of the tree, and the surrounding white aspen trunks and overcast skies.
Like pretty much all of Ann’s images (I think it’s what makes Ann’s images Ann’s images [if you can follow that comment]), she found a way to take advantage of the separation between the solitary foreground tree and the background aspens, and the texture of the grasses to lead you into the image visually. I’m continually amazed at how Ann is able to see and construct images that make you feel as if you’re on a walk through a landscape. Her images not only make me feel as if I’m physically there, but they show me where my next steps will take me, inviting me to continue on my walk and teasing my brain with thoughts of what that experience will be like.
This image is no different.
For my part, I chose an image from the Pando Forest, which we visited fairly early on during our trip. And while I was on the Real Madrid side (read: losing badly, getting spanked in front of 100,000 Barcelona fans live, and the rest of the world on TV) of a battle with a head cold when we were at the Pando Forest, Ive discovered that I’d made several lovely images from our short stay there. I settled on this one for technical reasons as much as anything. Several of the other images were simpler in design, and in some ways more elegant. But this one had a full range of colors and textures that, I was hoping, would require the printer to shoot as many different colors of ink through the printer head as possible. That and the fact that the image turned out as lovely as I’d hoped, which hasn’t happened often enough for the images from this trip.
I remember seeing this tree from a distance and being taken with graceful trunks wrapping around each other. And then immediately realizing the chaos of the setting around it was going to cause problems. Thus, I struggled at the time with how to manage it all in a single image.
I remember it taking me some time to get my positioning, framing, tripod head height and lens selection right. I recall the struggle with finding the right scale for the image - it was too easy to lose the tree for the forest (well, background), and the forest for the tree (a meaningless trunk with no context). I recall the realization that I could use the downed tree-fall as an anchor on the bottom and the colored leaves as a framing backdrop on the top. And the two trees - one old, one young - as frames for the sides. Lastly, I recall the struggle with finding the right aperture to create just a bit of separation from the tree and the forest behind, while still retaining a sense of being in a forest.
Whenever you’re making this many decisions in an image, you never quite know what you’re going to get. Looking at an after-the-fact image on a 3” LCD screen doesn’t cut it. You only really find out what you have when you’re a thousand miles away and are unable to adjust for any lapses of judgment in image making.
This time I think I got it right! The print sure looks like I did.