Printing the Image - Maintenance Edition
Sometimes life reminds you just how difficult things can be. Well, perhaps not “difficult,” but how vast the gulf is between “ok” and “good,” and just how little it takes to drop from the latter to the former. That’s what my rushed print session, two days before we’re taking off on our Iceland trip, was - a reminder. A reminder that no matter how good technology is, or how good an image can look at first glance, excellence is not achieved by accident. There are dozens of things that can come into play to lessen an image. Sometimes it feels like each and every one of them is actively trying to lessen images, every image. Every time. You have to push yourself, your discipline, your eye, your skills, and your judgment at each stage of making an image to get a successful result. That’s why I call it work. When it’s successful, it’s work I love. I even love it, though admittedly less so, when it falls short. When that happens, it’s time to learn. I ask myself, “Why?” I think about it, I study it, perhaps return to try and make the result better, sometimes just to learn and move on. That’s part of the work. Because in that work is where discovery lies. Wonder is to be found. And the joy of seeing is realized.
So that’s what my pre-trip printing session turned out to be - a learning lesson. I should have known better. I was rushed. I knew that I had not finished developing any of the images I’d selected to print. In fact, for one, I done nothing with it - it is pretty much a straight-out-of-camera print. And it shows it. I probably should have printed the abstract images from Death Valley, except I wasn’t sure it would use most of the colors of ink, which was the purpose of the print session - get all the colors of ink flowing through the printer before our extended trip to Iceland. So I went with these images.
I’d settled on three images from our afternoon stop at the Alabama Hills. Yeah, I still haven’t progressed much more on that 1-week trip set of images to select any from Joshua Tree. Boy, am I going to have a lot of undeveloped work from 2025 to work on when we get back from Iceland. But I digress. The afternoon we spent at the Alabama Hills was rather interesting. It seemed like the light wanted to accommodate our desires. When we first arrived, it gave us brilliantly bright light, highlighting bushes and trees. After a couple of hours of work, a veil of high clouds spread across the skies, allowing the opportunity for very different types of images.
The first image I printed was one that made me stop the car. Bright light highlighting a fiery tree, with budding bushes in front of it and stunning desert bushes and rocks in the shadows behind. It’s a lovely image. I spent some time working on it, but knew it wasn’t quite done.
The print revealed that fact rather bluntly. Prints don’t “read” like screens and here, parts of the image screamed “wrong” in the print. First, there’s a bright spot on the bush to the left of the tree. In the print it’s like a flashlight distracting your eye away from the subject. Second, your eye also gets pulled to the upper left corner. If you look at the top edge, about 1/4 of the way in from the left, you see three bright spots - light catching a plant on the cliff. On screen it doesn’t look like much, but on the print it’s a horrible distraction. Just as the camera is not the eye, so the screen is not the print. Those are the two most obvious flaws in the print. I’m sure there are others - some flaws, some areas that can be improved. Perhaps I needed to do a print to discover those flaws. Face it, it’s a process. What I do know, even from this print, is that it can be a striking image. That is comfort enough from a printing session done on the fly.
The second image was . . . blah. I couldn’t believe my eyes when it came out of the printer. I was rushed so there was no question I was going to try and “correct” it and reprint the image. Afterwards, as I was shutting everything down, I took a look at the image in Lightroom and realized that, other than convert it to a black and white image, I had done nothing to it. Nothing at all. In 5 seconds, I had it looking 10x better. But now wasn’t the time to work on it, so I’ll leave it as is to return to later.
Again, it’s an image that takes advantage of the raking light we encountered early in the afternoon. And I printed it because I wanted to make sure that I’d push all the grays and blacks the printer can produce. How better than a black and white print? It does, however, remind me of my first sessions in the darkroom, long before I’d immersed myself in Ansel Adams’ Zone System and calibrated all my films and papers. Flat, lifeless images that scream that they really can be so much more. All I can say is I have another image to return to.
The last of the bunch actually turned out well. Not perfect, but well enough to please. That’s unsurprising because it’s the one I spent the most time on as I was going through the trip images. No, it wasn’t quite ready, but I’d spent time on it on a couple of occasions and it was starting to capture the subtle glow of the rocks along with the soft but deep shadow that comes from the transition between cloud cover and bright blue skies. This is one out of a series of the same image I took as the rock went from shadow to bright sunlight and back again three or four times. The ones in transition light are the best.
I printed this one larger than the others - on 11x14. I don’t know if the size really makes any difference, but the larger size really allows you to explore the textures of the plants and rocks. And of course, the space created by the rock overhang in the upper center of the image. It’s a lovely print that I’m thinking might be even nicer on a matte paper. I guess that’s not going to happen for awhile, is it?
ADVENTURE UPDATE: If things are going well, I’ve figured out how to squeeze in a post or two while traveling and this post will seem out of order. I wrote it up just in case it took me a bit to start posting from Iceland (if I do at all). Anyway, by the time this posts we’ll have done our Denmark thing, arrived in Iceland, photographed a couple of water falls and, if we’re lucky, some puffins. If we’re on schedule, today (the day you’re reading this) is a laundry day and I’ve managed to download some images and cobble together a blog post to upload (if I haven’t posted something already). Hopefully, I’ll keep cranking posts out for you as the trip continues.