Santiam Portfolio

I’ve hinted several times in recent months that I’ve been working on a number of photographic projects these past few months.  The first of them was the Zanzibar Portfolio from the morning I spent wandering the streets of Stone Town.  This second of the portfolios comes from a similarly intense photographing session on Mother’s Day 2018 when I started photographing the riverbed of the Santiam River in the Cascade Mountains.

I’d selected a number of images I made and decided to print them 9” square on 11”x14” paper.  And while they won’t fit into one of the pre-made folios I have, they are intended to be held in the hand.  I’d screwed up and accidentally printed one of them 10” square, and while it seemed surprisingly larger than the 9” version, and significantly better if it were to be viewed hanging on a wall, the 9” image on the page, with the 1” side borders feel right in the hand.

There are many reasons to print, and I’m often surprised at what I discover in a print that I hadn’t seen on my monitor, even when it’s well calibrated.  This series truly left me awestruck about how blind I truly am to color.  Take for instance, this first print.  I’d not noticed the purple reflections on the surface of the water, almost a sheen, across much of the lower portion of the image.  On the print, not only the color, but the ethereal effect it creates and the depth it adds to the image is unavoidable.  It gave me a WTF moment, until I carefully looked at the image on my monitor.  

It happened as well with the second image.  I was fully aware of, and hoping that the warm yellow surface reflection that runs from the bottom left to the upper right would print as well as it shows on the monitor (it does), but the print made me acutely aware of the blues on the middle right edge of the frame, and the purple coloration of the lower right quarter of the image.  How did I not see that before?  (Yeah, I’ve got a long way to go before I “Miss Nothing!”).

By the time the third print came rolling out of the printer, I was looking for what I’d missed even before I hit the print button and there were fewer surprises now that I can see the multitude of colors that appear in the image below.  Still, they become much more apparent in print than they do on the monitor.  With images like these, it just adds an additional level of exploration to be had with the image, along with the overall composition of forms, the surface textures of the water, the incredibly detailed patterns of obscured features below the surface, and the overall coloration of the image. 

As the sun started to rise above the tree line that morning it gifted me with a new set of opportunities to explore.

Not only were the surface textures more readily apparent, the direct sunlight started casting patterns of shadow and light on the floor of the river bed.  But still, the prints throw out surprising patches of color (like the blue patch near the top edge) that keep the eye and the brain engaged.

And for awhile I tried to play with the light on the river bed, largely trying to avoid the surface texture of the water.  Much like those maps of the coastline that you can keep zooming in closer and closer and closer to discover ever more detail, these next few images do that. 

You can tell I was able to focus on the river bottom, and the objects are wholly recognizable, but they have this incredible strands of light that transform them.

And then there are the abstractions within the light strands, with the occasional flash of color that can be jarring.  The prints are a joy to examine closely. 

There was, however, one image that left me wondering.  At one level, I can say that it’s a reminder that, as Ansel used to say, some images want to be seen from a particular distance.  The image below is that image.  From 5 feet, it has the same incredible shifting field of greens underlying a vibrating surface that you see on the monitor.  In hand (from 18”), the surface of the water feels like a visual cheese grater.  It dissipates at arm’s length, but it is an image definitely not intended for close-up viewing.  I did nothing special with the sharpening for the image (i.e., none at all other than the normal sharpen for print on export), so I may need to unsharpened it a bit if it is to stay in the portfolio.

The final image has a bit of that edgy feel as well, but in this instance it helps to unveil the flow of the water through the parts of the image, so I don’t find it nearly as disturbing.

Overall, I’m pleased with the portfolio.  I may need to re-do the one image by de-sharpening the image a bit (and maybe the final one to), but as a whole they’re a lovely collection and well worth the effort to try and get just right.

It wound up being a rather nice birthday present!