Printing the Image - Unpacking Edition
It’s been a bit over . . . three months (has it really been that long?) since Ann and I last printed and I was starting to get nervous about weather that wasn’t healthy for our printer. Turned out my fears were justified, but fortunately not fatal. I decided that one of my tasks this weekend was to print something, anything, on our good photo printer just to give it a workout. I (wisely it turned out) decided the first thing to do was to run a print-head test print. It showed what I’d feared - several heads were clogged. Not horribly, but there were certainly indicators the head needed a good cleaning (the test print is a series of wavy lines in each color and if there are breaks in the lines - there were a few of them - then it means the heads need a cleaning).
So I ran the head cleaning cycle and then another test print. Better, but still some clogged nozzles. I went back into the maintenance menu again and hit the “extra strong head cleaning” button. A warning came up that it would use more ink than the usual cleaning. I hit the button again anyway. 5 minutes later it was time for another test print and . . . everything was precisely the way you want it. Whew! Bullet dodged. Time to start printing.
I’ll skip over the nightmare of just getting to images. Let’s just say that I’ve been so focused on everything else these past few months that . . . I’d forgotten how Capture One works. I guess you can’t blame me because in the interim, they’d come out with C1 2023, I’d upgraded but not uploaded it. When I did, they didn’t carry over any of my settings and . . . things are ever so slightly different in a way that just confounded me. Then again, I’m feeling like an old man so that might be it.
I’d decided that I would just work on a couple of images from last year that I didn’t really get around to printing, but I knew I wanted to. Fortunately, I say that because I’ve had very little “enjoyable just for me” time these past months with the move and everything, there were some improvement touches I’d wanted to do with each of the images, so I took my time and worked with them a bit.
The first image was the feather in the leaves from our trip to Amsterdam’s Hortus Botanical Gardens. It was a lovely image, but as I’d looked at it over time I’d realized there was a bit of a magenta color cast to it, perhaps as a result in the white balance of the image. So I took some time correcting that so that the image looked correct and, in particular, the white of the feather looks white.
Click on photo to see larger
When the image came out of the printer, Ann loved the feather. Both the stark veins in the top of the feather, and the soft white fluff at the base of the spine are simply lovely. Again, it’s a testament to the quality of the point-and-shoot camera we have.
I also worked a bit on the second image that I’d selected. It’s the same image from the Abstract Amsterdam post with a couple of subtle, but very significant adjustments. The first one was my desire to lessen the extreme perspective of the image somewhat so that it presented more as if you were looking flat down on it - not entirely, but a bit more. It’s kind of like correcting for perspective when you’re pointing a camera upward with a building - you can make the sides a bit more vertical. The drawback to that is that you start loosing significant portions of the upper part of the image and, in my case, that left out a cluster of floating leaves in the upper right of the image. Instead, what’s there is a dark emptiness.
It fundamentally changes the composition, making it a bit more abstract and, to be honest, less busy, so it’s a trade-off I can live with. Plus, having the patterns on the top of the image be larger than they otherwise would have been seems much more visually balanced to me than the original, which I still love.
I wasn’t the only one who decided to print something, though Ann had to search for something to work on. She wound up returning to our trip to Madeira for an image.
The image was from an afternoon stop at the Fanal Forest, on an afternoon where there was sun, not fog - not what the forest is known for. Still we went out and I think Ann was more successful than I was that afternoon. Several of her images from that day captured the interplay of light and shadow that I never quite captured. That’s the way it goes sometimes!
Her image has three nice features to it. First, there’s the splash of light across brown bracken fern at the bottom of the image that brings your eye down. Second, the shadow of the tree leads your eye to what Ann refers to as the “tunnel” between two trees that visually reach out to each other, with a lovely interplay of light and shadow beneath them. We printed the image on larger paper, so the tunnel is strikingly obvious. Third, the eye rises to the sky with the moon isolated in blue. You can tell it’s an excellently exposed image (and printed), because you see the textured surface of the moon instead of just a white circle in the print.
Everything about the print seems just right. Sometimes that’s all you need from an image, something that soothes you instead of slaps you in the face.
Well, that was it from our “unpacking” session. Hopefully, we’ll be getting out soon and start doing some real photography. We’ve got a few more things to take care of before we’re totally settled in here, but we’re feeling like we’re at the end of the transition. Just a bit more to go, and then we’ll start producing much more interesting blog posts.