Printing the Image - New and Old
What with preparing for and then hosting our first guests to Portugal, it’s been quite some time since I’ve printed anything, so I figured I needed to run some ink through the printer heads to keep things from clogging up.
While we didn’t really do any photography while Korenza and Soleis were visiting, I naturally had my camera with me and, given I’m still trying to get a feel for the Q2MR, that’s the one I had with me on most of our trips showing them around (read: playing tourist). Fortunately, Korenza and Soleis are great houseguests and traveling companions and they showed remarkable patience as non-photographers for some of the things that would stop me in my tracks and beg for me to pull out the camera.
One of those images is of an alley in Porto we came across as we headed our way downhill to the Douro River. The mix of light and dark, sense of perspective and, of course, the scooter made for a nice urban photograph and was a great test for the Q2MR’s dynamic range.
Which I must say is impressive and gives one a lot of lee-way to work with. I really can’t wait to get this camera out on a landscape photography trip.
I decided to print only three images (time has been tight around here lately) so I figured I needed to get some color ink running through the printer as well, particularly since my last couple of printing sessions included only black and white images. Unsure of what images to work on, I randomly opened up my 2019 image catalog and selected a day from one of our trips to the Painted Hills. There I found a couple of images that I’d marked for developing further, but hadn’t gotten to yet. They were ripe for the task at hand.
The first was a composition that was just as fun to print as it was to create. While not as contemplative or as “balanced” as many of my favorite compositions, I found this composition to have a tension between the smooth flowing textures on the lower half of the frame and the coarser, obviously drier part of the upper frame, both interrupted by the striking erosion pattern that ultimately is the subject of the image.
Unlike most of my images, I cannot remember even making this image. It was only from looking at the images around it in the catalog that I realized that it was from one of the other John Day Fossil Beds National Monument sites that we visited that day.
While I had been immediately attracted to the composition image, I didn’t forget the ink-flow purpose of the printing session and decided to look for an image that had a wider range of colors within it. Given we’d started that day in the Painted Hills that was easy to do.
Although there were clouds high up in the sky, as is often the case there, the horizon remained clear that morning so as the sun rose, we had ten for so minutes of stark sunlight raking across the horizon. That’s one of the reasons Ann and I love the Painted Hills so much, you never really know what the conditions are going to give you.
This morning was just another example of that. Looking at this image though reminds me of the sadness we felt that trip. It had rained a lot the previous weeks and the hills had started to slump, showing erosion marks that . . . for lack of a better word . . . seemed to deface these lovely hills like graffiti. That’s one of the things Ann and I have occasionally discussed on our walks, will nature have cleaned up the hills in the few years it will be before we get back to them? We’ll just have to go back on one of our trips home and find out.
There it is, a quick printing session with three images and a nice reminder of how interesting observing and photographing your surroundings can be, regardless of the environment you’re in.