Sand and Sky Portfolio - Color

When I’d first looked at the photographs Ann and I made at Death Valley’s Ibex and Eureka Dunes, I knew there was portfolio potential there.  It’s taken me quite some time and a lot of thinking to get to this point, but I think the effort was worth it.  Not only because I realized that there were two fundamentally different portfolios to be made (with some shared images), but because it has forced me to consider what it means for a collection of images to be together and to make some really difficult choices.  One of which is that both portfolios consist only of images from the Ibex Dunes.  As great as some of the Eureka dunes images are, they just don’t work together with the Ibex Dune images.  Another lesson learned is that we really, really need to go back to both places and spend more than a half-day (really it was less than that) at each.  If we ever get the bimobil to the US, we are definitely spending some real time at both locations.

In my post about the Sand and Sky black and white images, I talked about how I had a hard time with that portfolio until I started thinking about the unifying factors for the images - the abstraction of the images, the consistent square format, the desire to hold them in the hand.  Those constraints in some ways liberated my thinking about the color images.  It allowed me not only look at them differently, but once I’d realized that the selection and printing of these images would be as if they were to be viewed hanging on a wall, so many possibilities opened up and new images came into consideration.  Of course, I needed for them to work together, but the pool of images was substantially larger for this portfolio than the black and white portfolio.  That’s why I’m so surprised that, in the end, I have whittled the color portfolio down to 8 images.

I had told myself when faced with a couple of dozen color images that I should keep it to 12.  But as I eliminated one image and then another, my thinking became a bit more refined and the next thing I knew was there were 8 images, all from the Ibex Dunes.  So 8 it is.

Thinking of them as images on a wall instead of images in the hand allowed me to do a couple of things.  First, I had no worries about whether an image was a square, a vertical or a horizontal oriented image.  The image was whatever it needed to be and sequencing between them wasn’t a factor (like it was when I had thought of printing a portfolio of mixed-oriented images for the workshop we couldn’t attend).  Second, I could print the images as large as I wanted - as long as it looked good on the page.  No need to have images be consistently sized, or the paper oriented in a particular manner (thus cheating either vertical or horizontal images when oriented the wrong way on the sheet).

Then came the question of sequencing.  In the end, I settled on showing them in the order they were made.

The first image is one of the shared images between the portfolios.  Its abstract character belies the size of the dune segment contained within the image because it is a tight crop taken quite some distance away from the dunes using the longest lens I had with me at its maximum zoom length.  It was taken at almost 4:00 pm (it took us much longer to get there than planned [had to make a DEF run for Beast] and the hike out to the dunes was much farther than it looked), just as the late December sun was easing its harshness and really starting to add some texture to the dunes.  To give you an idea of the distance we hiked, I first framed this image about 20 minutes earlier, realizing I could hike in closer and get a tighter faming without having to crop the image (I still had to crop down from the top a bit).  It was yet another 20 minute hike after I made this image before I made my first photograph while on the sand dunes.

It was from thinking about the color images that I got the idea for the name of the portfolio.  Sand and Sky.  Sure, that name alone eliminated some broader landscape images, but that focus allows the images to maintain a visual consistency that might otherwise have not existed.

Based on Ann’s and my recent experience printing on fine art rag paper, I decided to print these on the Paolo Duro Smooth Rag as well.  It does a fine job of rendering the delicate forms of the dunes and clouds while at the same time retaining the surprisingly crisp details and textures that are scattered throughout the frames.  Perhaps it’s not as vibrant as the Paolo Duro Soft Gloss Rag, but the Smooth Rag has a quality that seems right with sand dunes.

One of the things that is so surprising about prints is that they seem to really reveal the subtleties of shadow coloration in ways that are not immediately apparent when the image is viewed on the screen.  For example, in the above image, the shadow of the dune in the foreground is much cooler (bluer) than the shadow right above and adjacent to it (visually) but lying on the background dune.  That coloration difference is probably because the foreground dune is oriented upward and is reflecting/is lit by the blue sky more.  The same holds true for the image below, though the background dune below has a bit of both, with the shadow on the left side much cooler than the one on the dune side facing you.

When working on the images I started realizing that the clouds near the horizon frequently look, for lack of a better word, dirty.  It finally dawned on me that there was a steady wind blowing on the dunes (thus their textures and overall forms, and sand that seemed to get into everything) and the sand kicked up by those winds lie between those low clouds and the camera.  Of course the lower lying clouds have a bit of sand coloration!  You really can learn a lot about nature from carefully looking at landscape photographs.

I have to confess to a major printing error when originally printing the first few images.  I’d started out by printing the first image of the sequence and the one below and had been . . . a bit disappointed in the quality of the print.  I wasn’t sure whether it was something really wrong with the printer or it was the result of the smooth tonal transitions in these minimally detailed prints, but I could see faint lines across the prints that looked like printer head lines.  Ann had started texting me while I was printing and as we discussed it (don’t we live in a wonderful world where Ann and I can chat from half-way around the world and she can help me solve a printing problem), something she said led me to look at one of the printer settings on my monitor - it was set to standard.  The next print I made I set it to maximum quality and . . . problem solved.  I’d just wasted 5 sheets of paper, but that was better than not being totally satisfied with the prints.  When you’re trying to make superb prints (even of crappy photographs), every little setting matters and it doesn’t take much (the wrong ICC profile, the wrong type of paper for the image you’re trying to print, having forgotten to calibrate your monitor recently, setting the print quality to standard instead of maximum quality) for an image to come out of the printer plainly obvious that it’s less than it can and should be.

As with the black and white print, once I’d gotten the print setting correct, the print below was mesmerizing.  Not all images can work in black and white and in color, but this one does.

One of the reasons I decided to sequence them in the order photographed is that as you work your way through the images, the coloring of the light begins to change, as does the color of the sand.  As the time approached five o’clock, the sand visually started to darken . . .   

and then the color of the light started changing rapidly.

I started working furiously because one glance to the horizon revealed that sunset was going to be earlier than normal sunset time because of the elevation of the western ridge of Death Valley.  Still, one shouldn’t rush image-making lest you settle for a lot of substandard images.  One thing I’ve learned (and have to keep reminding myself), is that it has to be one good image at a time - get a good one.  Then move onto the next one, and make that one good.  And then the next.  Shooting haphazardly gives you a bunch of haphazard images.

The image below is one of the reasons why I decided to liberate myself from too many constraints with the color portfolio.  The full-frame image is ok, with additional interesting (but very cool-colored) shadows in the foreground.  But the crop is something else.  You should double click on the image so it comes up larger in the Lightbox view.  It is quite striking on the 11 x 17 paper.

The last image was made just as the sun started touching Death Valley’s western ridge.  The softening light casts the desert sand a deep red, yet leaves the sky and clouds a normal blue.  I made the image and turned to my camera bag for a longer lens to focus more on the dune itself (recreating the image in full frame what is shown in the cropped square of this image).  In the minute and a half it took me to swap out lenses, the light was gone.  Totally gone, lacking entirely in any color.

I guess after nearly 3 years of looking at these images and thinking about how they may best work together, I can leave them alone for awhile.  It’s strange how about 2 hours of photographing can result in 2 portfolios, but it did.  However, printing the portfolios does leave me with one lasting feeling - we really do need to get back there!

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