PRINTING THE IMAGE - DEATH VALLEY DUNES AND THE PAINTED HILLS
Our short stop-overs at Death Valley’s Ibex and Eureka Sand Dunes during our Christmas 2018 trip were fruitful. We should have spent more time there, and likely will whenever we can plan a grand tour of the area again. For now, I keep returning to the images to see what they have to offer. All too often the immediacy of having made an image is too great and, over time, you begin to see things you’d missed previously that your unconscious didn’t at the time of making the image. Plus it can be enjoyable in many ways. Looking back at my different catalogs, I realize that 2018 was an incredible photographic year for Ann and me, and this was the last trip of the year when operating the camera and seeing images was as solid as its ever been.
I guess printing images for Ann a bit larger than we had normally been printing images was in the back of my mind. It often doesn’t sound like much of a size change, but moving from 8”x10” prints to 11”x14” prints or 13” x 19” is visually significant, particularly in the amount of detail you can see and the mere presence of the image. It isn’t necessarily the case with all images, but for some it matters. So when I was reviewing images from the days we photographed at the Ibex Dunes and Eureka Dunes and a couple of images called out to be printed large (larger than I would for a portfolio), who was I to say no.
I wound up with three images I worked on, each for a slightly different reason. The first two images came from a series of images I made in the Ibex dunes where I was concentrating on a distant dune ridge line and the shadows created by that line as it swept towards the camera. Strangely enough, I can recall that the thing that caught my eye at the time was the distant feature, the line between sand and sky, not the fascinating lines and shadows that were closest to me - those were just the icing on the cake.
The initial image was a closer crop of the ridge that left the foreground as more of an abstract composition than a landscape that I had turned into a black and white image during my first evaluations of the image years ago. Still, the textures of the foreground sand kept the abstract nature of the image within the tangible landscape realm despite its graphic nature. My desire to print it larger came from the need to have the foreground details be readily visible as well as from a desire to see how well the Epson could handle the starkly different tonal gradations within the image - sometimes smooth and subtle, other times near-immediate and dramatic.
The printer didn’t leave me disappointed. Not only did the shadows appear deep, they also kept within those deep tones a slight undulation and line that ran between the curves. Not only does the print hold the subtle mid-tone transitions (and the textures in the sand), it conveys the very subtle differences in the darker tones instead of pushing it all into black. I’m definitely pleased with this print.
The next image was the image that made me think that some of these images needed to be printed big. To paraphrase St. Ansel, some images want to be printed big. Although the image is very simple in its composition, it is a grand landscape-type of image and a huge dune. Size is needed to convey its enormity. Plus the added size will allow a viewer better explore the complex shadows and highlight areas of the dune structure as it sweeps back and forth. In many ways, this was the easiest of all of the images to develop. Other than a very minor crop away from the 2:3 ratio that I so despise, and a bit of adjusting to match the dynamic range of the image, all that was required of the image was to lighten the clouds a touch (for some reason they were a bit brownish and just looked wrong).
As I’d hoped, the complex tonal transitions on the right hand side of the dunes is captured beautifully. Printing is always something of a discovery process. For one thing, you see textures and details in a print that can’t be fully captured on a computer monitor, well, unless you have a large monitor and make the image very large. Still, prints astound one in the detail that can be conveyed in a way that a monitor can’t. Prints also reveal things your eye simply hadn’t noticed. With this print it’s the near-bizarre color shifts that are happening on the sunlit portions of the sloped dune. There’s a magenta color that you barely see that, having looked at other images, seems to be part of the coloration of the sand that only comes out when seen at a particular angle. At first, the print looked very strange with this reddish-magenta tinge on the dune. As the ink dried the effect of it died down so, like it is on the monitor, it is barely noticeable, but is very much real. I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point of actually seeing these subtle colorations while I’m out in the field photographing.
The third image came from our stop-over a couple of days later during a morning photography session at the Eureka dunes. Here again, the sheer size of the dune asked to be printed larger and I was hoping to see how well the subtle shadowing on the lower half of the image would come out in print. As with the other dune images, the ridgeline of the dune is prominent, but in this case it was much sharper though no less interesting in its visual effects.
I was concerned that printing the image larger would exaggerate the footprints that track throughout the dune and I hate to say it, but I was right. They do, indeed, detract from the image. It makes me we want to be there right after a really good windstorm . . . before people tromp all over it. Even accepting the footprints, this image seems not quite there. Here, it’s the shadow side of the dunes (foreground and mid-ground) that appear very bluish. Not just shadow blue (I had warmed up the big hill a bit in anticipation of this happening), but a real blue cast. Thinking it through, there is a bit of sheen on the dunes that I suspect is moisture in the sand that hasn’t burned off yet. I’ll have to be aware of that next time I’m out on sand dunes. I’m not quite sure, given the footprints, whether it’s worth trying to work further with this particular image.
We couldn’t do a printing session without Ann taking part, and boy did she. I’ve been working on a brief this week and at one point, when Ann said she was taking a break from doing new website stuff and decided to work on a couple of images (with her usual moaning about how depressing it was), I didn’t think much of it. The next day, during a break in writing I went upstairs and she asked me to look at what she was working on. As is so often the case, the images she showed me were amazing. I immediately said, “Hon, we’re going to do some printing before we leave. Will you please get these ready for printing. They deserve it.”
The first image was a pre-dawn image that included the moon in it. What I really appreciated about the image was that it was taken before the morning light really hits the sky and, while the sky may be starting to lighten, the land at that time usually tells you, in no uncertain terms, that it’s still night (at least for a little while longer). It may not seem like much, but a couple of days earlier, we’d watched a video of a landscape photographer who we really enjoy watching (and looking at his images). The video was about a pre-dawn image he made and . . . I feel guilty for even saying it, but he developed the image incorrectly. The sky was right, pre-dawn sun hitting the clouds, but the landscape looked like it was early morning. He said he usually doesn’t photograph in pre-dawn because his old camera turned the landscape to mush, but his newer camera (he just found out) didn’t. I guess like everyone, it takes a while to get used to really understand what’s happening, and then to embody the final image with that feeling. Well, Ann and I do photograph in those edges-of-light periods and getting that special feeling right takes good judgment and a steady hand.
So I was thrilled that Ann had done it so well. Particularly so when she asked me to look at the original RAW file. Just like the photographer from the video, it had way overexposed the land for the time it was taken (5-something in the morning). Ann had to not only bring down the landscape to make it feel like night, she also had to enhance the sculpting of the landscape that came from the light of the moon. It has that special presence you can feel at that time of the day in the Painted Hills (only without the sound of yipping coyotes off in the distance). You tell me . . .
Well, printing the image didn’t go quite as well as the image shows on the monitor. Once again, it’s the illumination (back lit versus reflected light) difference between monitors and prints, as well as getting everything just right with paper selection and use of the ICC profile that bit us working with this image. Just like the video we had watched, the darker foreground turned to mush. Ann and I talked about how she might remedy that on our walk the next morning, but it is really frustrating. High quality printing is difficult, especially when you’re trying to embody a feel in your images under very difficult light conditions. Here, that jump from the screen (successful) to print (not quite successful), fell a bit short in part of the image. The sky, the moon, the moon-lit distance is stunning. It feels like 4:15 in the morning (which it was) on a full-moon night. I think the print is very good; Ann thinks it should be better and I think she can make it so. It will certainly take a bit more effort, which probably means she’ll learn a lot along the way.
The second image had its own slew of problems, though less with the image than with the printer. This was another pre-dawn image, and once again Ann captured the feel of that period wonderfully. This one was made almost an hour after the one above and the light comes primarily from the below-horizon sun instead of the moon. This is one of those flow-though-the-landscape types of images that Ann seems to pull out of her hat time and time again that I struggle so hard to create. On the surface it looks so simple, but as your eye explores it you realize the image is incredibly complex.
I really am in awe. And while Ann feels that the print is a bit too dark (she may have one of her monitor calibration settings tweaked a bit off) and the colors a bit too saturated (although she decreased saturation a bit), the print is a beauty.
The problems came not from the print, but the printer. After multiple ruined prints (from paper edges curling up and hitting the head as it moved back and forth [even though we told the printer to use a thick paper setting]) and trying to load the paper from the front instead of the rear paper feed, we realized we had to make the image smaller and leave more of a border so the head wouldn’t clip the paper ends and ruin the last 1/2” of the image. We finally got a clean print, but it was an expensive lesson to learn.
It’s good we had a chance to print, even with the frustrations. We need to do more of it, and more focusing on just one image and taking our time doing it. This was a necessary printing because we’re heading off for a new adventure (finally) and we needed to give the printer heads a good workout.
Stay tuned, you should be seeing more from us as the week progresses. Madeira anyone?