Sand and Sky Portfolio - B&W
This and a related portfolio have been a long time coming. Not that I’ve put it off per se, but that it’s been a bit difficult deciding what should actually be in the portfolios. Even more unusual is that, up until this past week or so, I’ve had a harder time figuring out what should be in the black and white portfolio than the color. What changed things was that I finally figured out what the B&W portfolio needed to be, and how that differed from the color portfolio. That was helped along by one of the recent printing sessions for Ann’s images. Anyway, once I finally touched on that, it was, dare I say, fairly easy to select, edit and print the images, which I did last weekend.
The grand realization that got me moving forward was that I could (and should) abstract the black and white images much more than I could (or should) the color images. I had fewer images that I felt really could work in black and white (a few work in both), and I realized I need not tether myself to reality in the same way as I do with color images. I told myself it was time to tap into my inner Brett Weston (as if I could even come close . . . ) with developing the images.
I decided that I wanted all the B&W images to work together in the hand, so I settled on square images, and then further reduced that number to a tight sequence that would read from a landscape to increasing degrees of abstraction. I wound up with 6 images. All of them from the Ibex Dunes in Death Valley NP.
The first of the images is a traditional landscape image made mid-afternoon after arriving at the dunes. The subtle tonal gradations within the dunes were there, even with that less dramatic lighting, so I pushed the extremes a bit to introduce that graphic element early in the sequence.
The second image is where the graphic component really starts to rear its head. Still, you have the sky, but now there is an even more complex series of intersecting sand dunes. To add even more visual complexity, the sand dunes also appear to fold into themselves in places. I’m pleased that I’m finally starting to realize the subtle tonal gradations in digital prints that I was able to create on traditional silver-based printing paper in the wet darkroom. There is still a difference, but when done right, there is a real quality to the digital prints that shouldn’t be denied.
The third image is the first that focuses just on sand. I spent quite awhile in this one area, trying different compositions with these sand formations in-between two larger dunes. The fact that the sun was descending towards the horizon only helped with the graphic nature of these images.
The thing about these types of images is that sometimes it’s hard to get a sense of scale with them. The next image was actually one of the first images I took that day. I made it while hiking out to the dunes, stopping quite some distance from the dunes to put on the longest telephoto lens I had to capture the side of a giant dune. The delicacy of the formations belie the scale of the dune. Yet its beauty is undeniable.
And of course there is this next image, one you must be familiar with if you’ve followed along for awhile. I keep returning to it because it is so elegant in its simplicity. Again, like the image above, the scale of what is framed in the image is hard to discern, even more so given there are no footprints to hint at scale. But that’s part of the point, isn’t it. To see things in ways we normally don’t, and then to make a photograph of it.
The last image of the series is a step back closer to reality. Something one can understand from the photograph itself.
Still, this last image was the toughest one to develop. The two exposed grasses are truly blown out, which means if I want to darken the print so that those high-lit branches are even a slight gray, everything turns dark. For the main sand dune, that’s kind of what I envisioned, for the rear sand dune at the top, not so much. So it took a bit of work to lighten the top sand dune to where I wanted it to be without adversely affecting the lower sand dune or the subtle shading within it before it dropped off into darkness.
To be honest, I had to re-develop and re-print the first and last images on Saturday, though for different reasons. It was only after seeing the middle images that I realized I really had to be much more aggressive with the first image. It just looked flat and boring in comparison. It might have been fine on its own, but not when viewed with the other images. The images had to look consistent as a set, and that meant making the shadows darker and bringing out the clouds a bit more.
The last image was just too dark in the higher values. The light streak just looked muddy. Strange thing was that after I’d re-worked the image and still maintained some tonal value in the grasses, the upper dune was very close to the same tonal value as the original print, but the light streaking across the foreground dune was brighter and had a sense of lightness to it and a tonal variety that was quite different than the original print. I attribute that to a very different development technique I used in approaching re-developing the image. I worked with the tone curve instead of my usual burning and dodging. I’m still not totally comfortable with using the tone curve or even confident of when I should use that instead of other tools, but in this instance it worked.
It was well worth not settling on the first efforts with those two images and pushing them even further. This must be the most visually stunning set of prints I’ve made. They leave me speechless, and that’s not the wine talking. The abstract qualities and the range of tones in each image are mesmerizing. Best of all, they not only work individually, they work as a group. I’m glad I waited so long before developing and printing this portfolio.