Printing the Image - April
It’s been way too long since Ann and I have printed. Fortunately, we didn’t have any issues such as clogged printer heads and were able to get right to printing after the printer took an unusually long period to warm up and go through its cleaning/maintenance cycle. Ann decided to go with one of her recent Bandon images; me, I went with two - one from our recent Painted Hills trip, and an oldies composition that turned out splendidly!
Ann’s print came from our first morning in Bandon. It is, like all Ann’s images seem to be, one that visually leads you into the image. One that makes you feel like you’re there and invites you into the frame to explore what’s hidden. We watched a Joe Cornish video this week on YouTube and he uses the term “flow” that he likes his images to have. Well Ann’s print certainly has flow!
We spent quite a bit of time working with this image, experimenting on a couple of different papers and, more importantly a couple of different sizes. Ansel Adams used to say that some prints want to be a certain size. That’s so true, at least for many images. But they also want to be a certain size on the paper, and when you’re printing an image that is intended to be held in the hand, you need to have the framing be part of the print. So we wound up moving to a larger size paper and a substantial increase in image size, with the image still looking lovely, but just too large on the page. We then reduced the size of the image a bit so that, in the hand, the print is simply lovely.
Ann’s print is proof that you don’t need to have stunning, immediately spectacular lighting to make an incredible image. Ann’s print has a sense of space, textures, colors and vibrancy that makes the image come alive. You can feel the water, hear the surf and smell the ocean. What more can you ask from a print?
My prints have been nagging me for a few weeks now. A bit ago a friend asked a couple of simple questions about how Ann and I photograph. “What is the first thing you do when you are preparing to take a landscape shot?” and “How do you add texture to a photograph?” That led Ann and me to thinking about, talking about, and writing about photography because, hey, what better thing to think about than photography when doing mundane chores?
Anyway, my responses were a bit long, highly detailed and illustrated with examples. No one ever accused me of being short on words! Anyway, while putting my thoughts down, two of the images grabbed me and I told myself I’d print them at our next printing session.
The first was an image from our most recent painted hills trip. I hadn’t included the image in the blog post because I’d sent it earlier to Len. But revisiting it in a subsequent e-mail made me realize that it really needed to be printed. So I did.
I made a couple of slightly different prints and, while both are acceptable, neither is as exceptional as the image looks on screen. I decided to stop with it because sometimes you just have to live with a print (or a couple of versions of a print) to see what it is that is lacking. It took me all day yesterday and a bit of time this morning, but I think I’ve figured it out how I need to further develop the image to make the print glow. We’re still learning the difference between how images appear on a monitor and how they appear in print, realizing that it involves much more than just contrast range and luminance. The hard part is often figuring out what you have to do to the image on the monitor to make up for the deficiencies you see in the print. As I was explaining to Ann yesterday, it’s a very fine line between an image that looks good, or even very good, and one that simply comes alive. And you can cross that line of excellence in either direction (not enough, or too much) in any number of ways. No one said it would be easy, and it isn’t. It’s a learning process!
My second image was just the opposite. I’d printed it once before and had been quite unsatisfied with it. Because of that printing session, I worked on the image some more, in part because of something we came across on one of our YouTube watching the photographer sessions (I’d like to say it was Joe Cornish, but it could have been Charlie Waite, or any number of a few key photographers we watch). The person said that printing is the ultimate test. An image can look good on screen, but horrible in a print. But if an image looks good in print, it almost invariably looks good on the screen. So that’s what I’d done back then - worked to improve the image once I found the print unsatisfying.
And when I pulled up the image in Lightroom (this may be the final image I print from Lightroom - I wanted to print from the developed .dng file as opposed to from a .jpg) this time, I sat looking at it for a bit and made ever so slight adjustments to contrast and color saturation - both in the downward direction - and called it good.
The print is simply stunning! It has depth, texture and is, for lack of a better word, is alive! It’s what I hope every composition to be. Even as we were moving the print from Ann’s fairly dark office into the brighter dining room, Ann commented on how 3-dimensional it looked. I can’t say anything more than it’s exactly what I’d hoped it would be.
So another successful day of printing. We would have loved to work on more prints but . . . we were running out of chrome optimizer (I’d forgotten where I’d put the replacement cartridge I bought a while ago - Ann found it later), and we were going to dog sit for the afternoon so we had to get ready. Still, I don’t think either of us would complain about our results that morning.