The Online Photographer

The Direction of Error

I am not caught up on comments. (Been out working.)
The comments on the last two posts were so good I'm considering
feturing a few of them in separate posts. Stay tuned.

I once wrote a post called "Do You Have a Color Cast?" It was about the tendency of many color printmakers (what we use to call "printers," but that word now denotes a machine) to "lean" in one direction of the color wheel when making prints—lean meaning to depart from absolute calibrated neutrality just a tad. Many color printmakers feel a need need to see enough of their favored color cast, and are sensitive to its absence. For example, Ctein leans cyan; I lean red. Viewers might be sensitive to casts of different colors to different degrees, too: for example, most people are sensitive to greenishness, so you have to take care not to lean too far in that direction, but people generally have a high tolerance for yellow. In terms of the old color packs, you might be able to go only two points too green, whereas you could get away with as much as five or even seven points of extra yellow. This is doubtless because humans evolved seeing lots of early- and late-day yellow sunlight, when the angle of the sunlight travels a greater distance through atmosphere and leaches blue out of the light. The human eye likes the look. Many landscapists lean yellow; warmer light seems to have an innate appeal to viewers. As one printmaker I knew used to say, "a little extra yellow never hurts."

Similarly, I think a lot of printmakers and post-processors for screen display have what you might call a characteristic "direction of error." They, or rather we, will have some aspect of the picture or print that we tend to fret or worry about, and thus tend to overdo or "overcook" it as they say. For example, one otherwise very good printmaker I know periodically gets too worried about sharpness. When he's in one of those moods, his prints will be otherwise perfect but perceptibly oversharpened. And, when he's in that mood, his first question to you will be, "do you think it's sharp enough?" So that's his direction of error. A couple of commenters noted that a few of my new pictures look, to them, a little dark. Moose said, "...some of the others are too dark for me. Then again, we know our tastes differ." Maybe, but maybe that's not it, because I'm not sure he's wrong: "too dark" is my direction of error if I'm honest. It's something I have to watch out for. However, one's direction of error is a good thing to know about. Once we know our direction of error, it becomes easier to ask for help from objective third parties. If the question we might want to ask is "is it dark enough?", it probably means we should ask, "is it too dark?"

Mike

P.S. In regard to the color wheel, the "Hue Ranges Map" on this page is useful.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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V.I. Voltz: "When I printed professionally (darkroom days only) I found several things were useful for preventing drift: a set of reference prints to look at, a reflection densitometer to check that things weren’t going too far one way or another, and relatively frequent breaks from work/looking at work. The problem with the latter is that as much as everyone thinks or wishes that professional printing is like Nathalie Lopparelli at work, essentially the work requires you to go as fast as you can all the time. I miss the prints, but not the work."

Mike replies: I recall how shocked I was when I learned that the local professional lab only allowed its custom printermakers a few test strips and two sheets of photo paper per image! That wasn't for a "standard" B&W print; that was for the special custom version you paid extra for. "Going as fast as you can all the time" indeed. In fact I used to count this as one of big advantages of being an amateur: amateurs might not be as skilled or have as much experience, but they had the huge luxury of being able to spend as much time and effort—and paper—as they wished on each image.

Like you, I also used to keep a folder of reference images handy in the darkroom. The funny thing was, even when I wasn't experiencing any difficulties, if I just leafed through the pictures in the folder before the start of a printing session, just letting my eyes take them in, I would print better and experience lower levels of anxiety and/or frustration during the printing session. I never knew how that worked—it was like some kind of magic—but it worked. Similarly, if I put the cue ball exactly on the spot and try to lag it off both end rails and return it exactly to where it started, and do that ten to twenty times, I will shoot better all during that session. Again, it's magic of a sort.

Alan Whiting: "What we're up against here is the fact that the human eye-brain system is excellent at detecting differences, but terrible at establishing absolute values. If you take a piece of nominally white paper and view it by candlelight, fluorescent light, sunlight, and electric-arc light it will look white to you in all situations. However, if you actually measure its color, it's vastly different in each. You adjust. A similar thing happens with brightness. Probably the best that can be done is not to let things get too out of hand."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "My feeling on this issue is sort of representative of my philosophy across most things. There is a point of diminishing returns on these efforts. Everyone's eyes are seeing a bit differently and monitors are inconsistent across the board. So it would seem that the exhaustive efforts to make it perfect are futile!

"I've decided with the help of a couple buddies that I am an 80% guy. I'm an 80% healthy eater—I try to eat organic foods when I can and avoid wasted sugar intake. I am an 80% exercise fit person—maybe three or four 45-minute workouts per week. Etc, etc, etc.

"I look at my monitor, compare it to the histogram and what my prints look like. If an image looks good on my monitor and I like the print that results, I let the rest go.

"It seems like the last 20% of perfection are a bunch of rabbit holes. Maybe there is one thing in your life that you can truly chase to 100%. But you should probably be careful in choosing one! It comes at the expense of many other things.

"Yes, I could go from 18% body fat to 10, but it would require incredibly strict eating and 15+ hours per week in the gym. Not interested. I could go from a 4–5 handicap golfer who plays recreationally to maybe a 1, but I would be at the golf course six days per week for hours. Why? I'd rather be roaming a city making photographs, getting lots of steps in, stop for a nice lunch with some dark chocolate for dessert, download and edit on a monitor where the images look good! Then enjoy a nice dinner! No rabbit holes. No obsessing over minute details."

Mike replies: When I was darkroom printing, I followed your 80% rule most of the time, but, just as an exercise to keep my chops up, I would occasionally (like, once every six months to two years) print a bunch of negatives as fast as I could, spending as little time as possible on each, and on other occasions I would spend lots of time and effort trying to print one negative as perfectly as I possibly could, in some cases spending hours one day and then more hours the next. I felt that most darkroom workers tended toward one or the other—speed or care—based on their personal style and general psychology, and I felt I could benefit from learning both ways. Both exercises improved my printing.

And by the way, one of the reasons I chose my car was a review that said it handled very well up to 80% of of its maximum performance but started to fall apart as you pushed it to go above 80% and tried to get closer to 100%. I reasoned that I never pushed a car past 80% but wanted it to handle well up to that point. I still have that car after 10 years and still enjoy it.

George Sinos: "Several years ago I taught a photography class at a local community college. I had the same digital photo file printed by six different companies. In addition, I worked with a local lab to have one print made as 'neutral.' There were never any prints that matched. They all had different color casts and saturation. I asked every class which print was the most 'correct' and which was the most preferred. The choices for most 'correct' were all over the map, but most preferred was almost always the most over saturated version. The 'neutral' version was seldom picked."

Mike replies: I used to run lots of those "focus group" type of tests. I would have loved to do a test like yours, but never did. Still, we need to remember that most people aren't experts and haven't learned how to look. Similar to the way that most people in the general public don't have any aptitude for music but are still choosing which music is "best" by listening to it or buying it. (You probably know at least a few people who just don't even listen to music. They have so little aptitude for it that it's not part of their lives.) To give you an example, I used to put up three prints of the same negative in front of my photography classes. I would ask them to describe the main difference between each one. One was printed with a paper/developer combination that looked warmer and more brown on a more off-white base, one was neutral, and one was pretty heavily selenium-toned, giving it "eggplant" blacks on a colder white paper base. The classes of 12–15 kids would usually be mystified, so I'd tell them the difference was color. That mystified them even further—inevitably, several kids would say something like "what are you even talking about? They're all black-and-white! There's no color version!" Just as inevitably, one or two perceptive kids would "get it" at some point and see it on their own. But, curiously, or so I thought, there were usually a few kids in each class who just couldn't see the color differences even when I and the kids who could see it were telling them what to look for.

It was really very interesting.

Ed Hawco: "For years I had the small problem of each eye seeing color differently. One eye saw it 'correctly' (by my interpretation) while the other had a warm, slightly greenish tint. The difference was only perceptible when I would look at a scene or image by alternating eyes.

"About a year ago I had cataract surgery and it changed everything. The surgery involves replacing your eyes’ lenses with new, artificial ones. Not only do I no longer need glasses for distance (and driving), but I now see color the same way through both eyes, and I see it correctly.

"I was shocked at how cool and blue everything looked at first, thinking it was a defect. The eye doc assured me that what I was seeing now was 'real' color for the first time in years, and that my brain would adapt quickly and would stop seeing it as weird. As I like you tell people, 'before surgery my neighbour had a yellow car; now he has a white one.'

"I was worried that I’d have to re-color balance my photographs and maybe even re-print them, but for some reason that doesn’t seem necessary. My photos seem to have the same colors as they always did; it’s real life that has color shifted. I have no explanation for this other than a.) I suppose this shows I’ve never been very particular about color balance (I’m B&W at heart) and b.) the brain really does amazing and unpredictable things with our vision."

Monkey Coffin (More Troubles With Terminology, Dept.)

Ich bin kein Affensarg

In film days:

Printer: Human person who made prints, usually a darkroom worker making photographs on light-sensitive paper. Also, in commercial parlance, a person who operates a large printing-press, also called a pressman.

Printmaker: Artist or artisan who made fine-art prints using any of a number of craft-based method for creating multiple artworks, e.g. woodcuts and linocuts, copper-plate etching, silkscreen, intaglio engraving, stone lithography, etc.

These days:

Printer: A machine, usually but not exclusively inkjet, that makes prints.

Printmaker: Same as old definition.

Missing in action, or rather co-opted to the point of confusion, is a word for the human person who makes prints, including one who uses a printer! Is it really the case now that a printer uses a printer to make prints? Or is that a printmaker, who somehow switched from stone lithography or linocuts to Epsons? We need a new word. ("Printer" dates from the 15th century.)

I was very proud to be a printer, back when I was one. It was one of the few things I was ever expert at doing. I'm not happy with having my title usurped by a large plastic box the size of a monkey coffin that nobody can keep working.

That is all,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Burke: "'Computer' would be another term which has lost its humanity. Prior to the 1960s a computer was a person who performed calculations; NASA (and its predecessor organisation) employed many computers in the 1950s. Here's a link."

Mike replies: Lensmakers employed (carbon-based) computers as well, to calculate ray tracings. Silicon-based computers do it infinitely better, because far more calculations can be performed.

Bob Johnston [no relation]: "I know how you feel. I used to consider myself a good darkroom printer. I couldn't believe it when all that skill, accumulated over years of practice, was thrown on the scrapheap. I knew what was going to happen so I was an early adopter of the whirring box. Those early printers were terrible. It was well-nigh impossible to make a black-and-white print without a colour cast. Now they are really very good. My Epson P800 is still printing after six years of use. Oh for the days though that all you had to replace every year or so was the enlarger bulb.

"I still have my darkroom. It was fun to show my grandchildren how it was done but otherwise it's just nostalgia."

Stan B.: "The one that gets me is 'editing;' back in the day, it was separating the wheat from the chaff. Now it's for, it's for...ya know—making the thing look good. Don't know what the word for that is, or should be—but I thought 'editing' was already taken!"

Instant Relatives and the Heritage Box

Seen in a local antiques / old stuff store:

I know this is intended to be dear and funny, and you're supposed to smile, but I can't help but feel sadness in it; these are the shadows of actual people, who lived lives on Earth, and many of those souls have gone out of living memory. Of course, being remembered by posterity isn't a necessary condition for living, or having lived, a good, rich life, and many of the people in these pictures might have done so. But...still.

Making small, durable prints and mounting them on cards or in little folders was a great system for those strange imprints of the past we call photographs, but that system had one fatal flaw: it depended on individuals to notate the pictures with identifications, significances, dates, locations, and stories. For years I would counsel any kind of photographer to take a pencil and write on the back of prints the five W's:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why

...But of course few ever took such advice, and now there's nothing to write on. We don't even make prints for the most part. My beautiful grandson will be eight months old tomorrow, and I have dozens of lovely pictures of him (his mother is artistic, and a sensitive photographer), and they have a digital picture frame in their apartment where he is on ongoing display. He doesn't want for a photographic record of his first months. But I wonder if there has been even one paper print made of his image yet? It's possible not.

I looked at a few, and none of the pictures in that box that I saw had any writing on them. All those poor lost people were separated from their very names, much less any comment on their significance, their relationships, or any other specifics of their personhood. They go unrecognized now, forever.

The master box
In my wiser years, I've come around to a realization of the obvious, which is that photographs are only randomly durable, and mostly prove perishable. Transient. Consumables. Winking into existence in split-seconds, then later winking out again. I'm a guy who cares much more than the average bloke about pictures, and about the preservation of family pictures, but, when my father died, at the end of 2020, he arranged things such that all of his "archives," meaning, the entire record of my and my brothers' youth, and our family's activities (which he carefully documented, in beautiful little books of 5x7s), as well as all of his own historical family pictures he possessed going back well over a century, and—especially ironically—all of my own best photographs I had taken up until my middle teen years—including my first published photo, and the magazine it was published in—all of that—were lost for good. So if I can't see to it that such an extensive photographic record isn't lost, why would I expect that others would? Or could?

My updated advice (I harp on this): make a "heritage box." In one good-quality (waterproof! Crush-proof!) box, or perhaps two, put all the very best prints of your family pictures and your own prints, arranged, organized, and notated, and label the box "[Name's] Best Photos," or "[Name] Family Photos." Be very selective. These are the ones to store near the door and save in a house fire. If you haven't had time to organize and edit your archives, your children and grandchildren certainly won't. Make it easy on them. They might try to preserve everything, but it isn't likely. The more disorganized your archives, the more likely your heirs will just have to throw everything out, and your precious pictures will perish when you do. You might not mind if this happens, but maybe they will; or maybe their children will; and we should think of them. (Just my opinion.)

On the other hand, no one takes my advice—including, so far, me. So don't feel bad if you don't.

Is this post too much of a bummer? I think it is. I had intended it only to be dear and funny. Let's move on!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Speed (partial comment): "Our son has been working since before COVID on digitizing, annotating, organizing and sharing almost 100 years of family photographs and videos. We were and are a family of cameras and occasionally video cameras. It's not unusual for family members to spend an hour or two together on Skype reviewing photos and documents (thank you, Ancestry), bringing back memories and telling stories. One day we visited (by appointment) the archives of a university attended by three generations of us, to view and copy student lists and documentary photographs. It's been a lot of work. Happy work. And, once done, thanks to almost unlimited and nearly free storage and sharing, work that will endure and hopefully won't need to be repeated."

Andreas: "Is it a bummer? No, it isn't. Keep reminding us to sift, sort, tag, edit and back up (!!) our collections. Doing so might be a drag, but later it is a breeze to find just this one picture. And having an album with family pictures is always worth the effort: our kids and grandchildren will love it."

ritchie thomson: "A few years ago I was visiting my parents, and we were drinking tea at the kitchen table, when my Mum said 'your father has thrown away all of his old slides.' I didn't speak for a moment, as I found this hard to take in. Thinking I must have misheard, I asked, 'What, all the photographs he took from the early 1950s to the 1990s?' 'Yes.' I couldn't say anything for a while. I thought about some of the lost photos, all the family history Dad had recorded with Kodachrome and his Pentax Spotmatic F. I had to calm myself down a bit before saying anything. I was taken aback but I didn't want to show just how much, in case it upset Dad, who was in his late eighties. Eventually I said calmly, 'Why did you do that Dad?' He said, 'I haven't got a projector anymore.'"

Stan B.: "If anything, it serves as a realistic reminder. We often photograph for posterity; sadly, it's a short lived one...I often think about the nearly impossible odds that were somehow, almost magically averted to salvage the work of Vivian Maier."

Elsa Louise: "Your father sounds like he was a spiteful man. Why else would he have made certain to destroy what, to many, would be a family heirloom?"

Mike replies: Unfortunately, he was just the type to do it out of spite, or perhaps "lack of regard" would be a better term, but I have consciously decided not to blame him for it, but to believe, instead, that it was a succession of circumstances rather than a conscious decision on his part. The run-up to his death lasted about eight months, and started when he had some sort of medical event and went to the hospital. He never went back to his little apartment as far as I know. He ended up in a rehab center where the staff were under strict instructions not to reveal anything about him to anyone. My brother (a doctor) kept calling the rehab center asking for news for more than a year after our father's death, and they never told us that he had died, or that he was no longer in residence there, or indeed anything at all. In addition, his death certificate listed "dementia" as the cause of death, so I can forgive him on that level as well. On the other hand, in the mid-2010s he tried to ransom the family photos—he approached my mother and demanded $3,000 for them. As we all had learned to do, she chose not to engage. I should have just paid him what he asked at that time. I could have afforded it then. Life is inevitably full of regrets.

Lisa S. Gorrell: "I think it's sad, too. I have friends who purchase these photos if there is identification on them and then try to locate descendants in order to return the photos. There are places like DeadFred.com, where photos could be uploaded and perhaps identified. Often there were more than one copy of the photo sent to family members and someone else might have the same photo identified."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Note that there actually is a very lively niche market for anonymous photos! For example, I have an acquaintance who has devoted decades to collecting these photos. His collection is so richly built that he has donated subsets of it to museums (for examples, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago) and lent them to artists who have used them to curate and create some terrific artistic publications. Yes, the subjects are still unknown…but, hey, so are the subjects of so many of the world’s most beloved paintings! In the end, I am more saddened by the loss of materiality in popular photography. I second your admonition, and encourage everyone to, at the very least, get their family and friends photos printed."

Printing Papers

I'm sorry, but I've been down a few rabbit holes over the last few days, which is awkward when the rabbit hole doesn't involve photography. Speakers and houses. I was all set to write a post about my pet peeves about house design (all 27 of them) when I thought, nah, I can't do that to my poor readers. They come here to read about photography.

Fortunately, the cavalry arrived over the hilltops, bugles blazing, in the form of a large, fat mailing tube in my mailbox. You remember my plan to offer a print of the "Mennonite Boys" picture? Well, the proofs arrived from Bob Rosinsky in Colorado. Bob is a photographer, a TOP reader, a custom printer, and a guy who has seen an inordinate number of UFOs.

And something happened that has never happened before: the prints inside were so good that there was nothing I need changed and nothing I would have done differently had I been doing it myself. That's never happened. Normally, what you do when someone else prints your pictures is that you send them a file, they send you a proof, and then you get to work: you tell them the changes you want, they apply them and send another proof, and then rinse and repeat until done. It can be anything from a small thing or two to a long, drawn-out process of many iterations. It can take weeks. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just the process, just what it takes. It's normal.

The Maytag repairman
One of the best printmakers I ever had was a guy at a camera store, of all things. The store had an older employee who sat "in the back" at a big computer. He had one of the HP Z-series printers, 36" wide if memory serves or maybe 24", and you would sit there and look over his shoulder in real time while he did the Photoshop preparations, discussing options together, and then he ran the first proof off and you looked at that and went from there. It was great. The store didn't even charge a lot. I thought I'd use him going forward, but about the fourth time I went in to have a print made, the old guy was gone, replaced by a kid who had obviously just been trained. Apparently the old guy just found himself sitting around back there with no customers too much of the time, and he got tired of it. Oh well.

I get the feeling Bob really slaved over these. Plus, he's been seeing my pictures here since 2007, and he has absorbed a sense of how I like my pictures to look. He gave me samples of four different papers: Moab Lasal Exhibition Lustre 300, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Moab Lasal Photo Matte, and Epson Hot Press Natural.

We had already decided to offer a small print on 11x14" paper based on the recent print size poll, but it's the large image floated on 17x22" Epson Hot Press Natural that's the real stunner. It's just gorgeous. Bob did a fantastic job—it's not easy to get dark contrast to print right, much less when you have large blobs of bright light that have to have the transitions look right. He corrected the verticals perfectly. He printed the big one to look right in room light—in other words, on a wall. If you flood it with strong light, the darks will look a little weak; but in more subdued normal room light, it comes alive and sings. So we'll offer a small one, but I have to offer the large one as well. It couldn't have turned out better. I'm very proud of it. (And relieved that the print worked—it didn't have to, with that file. There's no disappointment quite like a file you love on the screen that doesn't print.)

With the help of a friend (I don't usually name people until I'm sure I'm going to use their services, in the way I didn't name Bob until now—these folks are professionals, and I want to preserve their anonymity in case we decide not to work together), we're planning a new sale page, and it looks like we're going to be able to have a permanent store. So maybe the small low-cost print will be the offering in the print sale, and the large print will be available on an ongoing basis in the new store. We'll see how all that works out.

Curiously, Bob and I agree that we like the Hahnemühle print the least with this image, which is only worth remarking on because we both expected to like it the best! Some papers just look better with specific images, that's all. You can think all you want and assume all you want, but you've got to see it with your eyes before you can make up your mind.

I have a bit more news on this front, but I'll put it in another post.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Our Print Sales Need to Evolve Too

I spoke yesterday of how my writing and comment-moderation workflow here on TOP might need to change. Well, our print sales might need to evolve as well.

I've heard anecdotally from a variety of sources that print sales are slowing across the board, as the tradition of fine printmaking continues to evaporate from the culture of photography. Our print sales have certainly declined. I'm not sure I can ascribe that to anything in the broader culture, however. TOP's audience has constricted to about one-third the size of the audience at peak (2013), although the readers that remain seem much more engaged, devoted, and active—also, they're more dedicated or devoted to photography or however you want to phrase it, more experienced and knowledgeable. TOP doesn't attract hordes of casual visitors looking for shopping advice any more, that's for sure.

Anyway, it might be time for a transition here too. Our old model (taking orders in advance for a limited time and fulfilling them after they were already sold) worked quite wonderfully. But it's a high-volume model. Our best print sale sold ~735 prints, and our most lucrative made $128,000 in profit. Another artist first agreed to make 50 prints, but that 50 sold so rapidly that he agreed to make 100 more. Those vanished as well. Yet another print-sale artist told us that the check we sent her was the largest amount of money she'd earned at one time in her life.

But those days are long gone. Now we struggle to sell 100, and often don't reach 50. And the profits are more modest.

Great good fortune
It's still nothing to sneeze at; not at all. When's the last time you sold 35 prints of a single picture? It's very unusual. The number of photographers who sell 35 prints of one picture in a gallery show are a tiny minority. Most people who have gallery shows would be over the moon to sell 35 total. So I'm grateful we can do that. Looked at objectively, it's still very fortunate that we do so well. Quite wonderful.

It might be time to change the sales model, is all. For one thing, the printer still needs to be paid. The first print is where a lot of the labor is. If we sell 125 prints, the first print is a small proportion of the whole. If the printer is providing 15 prints, it's a larger part of the work. It becomes harder for us to cover that cost. One printer won't work with us unless we can guarantee 100 sales.

So what I'm thinking of is switching to some kind of small-volume model. As you can see from the last post but one, 148 readers put themselves into the category of people who would consider buying a print of "Mennonite Boys Watching Dirt-Track Racing." But how many people actually will buy one? Fifteen per cent? Ten? So call it 15 to 22 sales. And that sounds about right.

So maybe I should have the printer make 15 copies (or 15 and three artist's proofs), and I'll pay him out of my pocket, and then we'll offer the 15 until they sell out. The price would have to be higher doing it that way, but still nothing too onerous. (And sometimes people want to pay more, but that's another post.)

I'd like to try that with reader prints, too. Your prints, I mean. I have in mind three prints by readers. I could ask each person to provide, say, ten copies of his or her print, and then offer them without a deadline. They'd just sell until they sold out. Wouldn't it be nice to make a sale out of the Baker's Dozens, for instance?

I'll have to think about that. Anyway, that's all that this post is trying to say: that I'm thinking about this. The volume model is on the cusp of not making enough volume, so maybe it's just time to change.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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On Printer Machines and Klingon Cowgirls

Photographic terminology drives me buggy. It is not only poor to start with, but then it changes. A lot of terms that were correct and proper when I was young, even though they kinda didn't make sense, are no longer known to young people now. And so they get the terms wrong. Or maybe wronger. Perhaps just wrong in a different way; variants of wrong.

Anyway, "printer" is now a problem, and it wasn't forty years ago when I was in art school. A printer back then was a human person who printed, and there wasn't much ambiguity. A printer, now, is this black lump:

...And yet a printer-person is still also a printer, which gives rise to possible statements such as, "I decided not to get a printer, so I need to find a printer."

As is our way, eventually language shall catch up to the use-cases and we'll find a way to indicate needed distinctions. Maybe the problem in photography is merely that its changes consistently keep two hops and a sidestep out ahead of language, which then always has to keep up, and can't, quite. Little me, fenced off here in my little virtual domain, tried in my usual wan and lugubrious way to offer up a correction for this, but I'm not good with names or coinages, alas. I tried to start calling the person a "printmaker." This has not, um, become universal. It would have been nice if printers like the Canon above had been called "printer machines" from the get-go, but I know better than to hope anything will change. A few of you indefatigable longtime readers will recall that I originally made the suggestion that "digital imaging" and "photography" should be made distinct, terminologically speaking. A photograph should be something that makes a direct record of the light of the lens image; a digital image is an analog, a map, if you will, of picture elements substituted for points in a lens image, that can be modified at will.

You know, this would be a fun idea for a book: use confusing and confused terminology as a jumping-off point for riffing-slash-educating about photography. I would have fun with that.

At any rate: after a whole day of research a.k.a. poking about the web until my butt hurt from sitting too long, it appears that the Canon Pro-1000 (B&H, Amazon) might be the most recommendable home printer for advanced amateurs on offer today. It apparently does B&W really well, it still has 80-ml ink tanks for $59 (74 cents per ml, or $2,791.74 per gallon) whereas its chief competitor, the Epson P900 (B&H, Amazon), now gives you only 50-ml cartridges for $44 (88 cents per ml, or $3,331.16 per gallon), and ships with carts that are only a quarter full, which is really very stingy of Epson—they want to get you on that needle ASAP—and Carl reports that his P900 is cranky about paper-feeding. Not that there's anything wrong with a P900; it gets 4 our of 5 stars on Amazon, vs. 4.4 for the Canon, and users report top-quality output. But the Canon seems to have just that bit of an edge.

Evidence in front of your own eyes
My suggestion that "photography" and "digital imaging" (DI) should be distinct was angrily shouted down, back in the day, by many of those to whom I floated the idea. My judgment was that it was a status issue to them, because, in the early days, film was what had all the weight and prestige, and DI was the poor techie-dweebie come-lately stepchild struggling to come up to film's level. Obviously those days have passed. Anyway, the suggestion that DI was inherently different and needed to be linguistically cordoned off was met with umbrage and outrage. It was exactly the same thing, the shouters shouted; it's just a different method of accurately and exactly recording the lens image, if you want it to be; there's no requirement that you change anything. And besides, it was easy to change things in film photographs too! I have eight examples from history right here! You're an idiot!

Flame wars ensued.

Oh, really? Well, consider this photograph (clue—this is a test):

Now, you're a savvy picture-looker-atter, so you probably sense something's fishy. You might at first think that this is a modern recreation of an old-tymey somethingtype, and that those are modern people in costumes. Because you've seen that before.

Well, wrong, albumen-breath. As you might know if you read PetaPixel, the people in that picture never lived and breathed; they're not actual humans who ever existed. The image has no historicity whatsoever. The picture is a creation of version 4 of an artificial intelligence image generator called Midjourney. Mario Cavalli, who collaborated with the program to create this, gave it verbal instructions, and this is what the generator came up with.

Good as it is (uncanny valley, anyone?), if we look at the image a little more closely, we start to see that there are still a few bugs in the system. For example, the man in the background appears to be wearing a hat that is eight sizes too small; the sign hanging behind our historical couple appears to be written in Klingon; there were none to very few plate-glass windows that size in the era of that style of dress; and there is something very wrong with that fellow's right hand. Birth defect, you might say, in a metaphorical way. And they appear to be sitting on—what? At least the image gets one insight rather right: the pained expression on the face of the virtual cowgirl might be due to the fact that she appears to have rather overtightened her corset, poor dear. Either that or her waist measurement is actually 17 inches. Another birth defect, perhaps?

It's fine for me to act all superior, but the scary thing is: the bot will get better. Soon you won't be able to tell a photograph-as-legitimate-evidence of things in the world, from an image created from verbal instructions by a very smart dumb machine. Lies, which are increasing greatly in popularity in our culture lately, will become even more invisible as far as photographs are concerned. Photographs will no longer show you anything accurate about the world. That you can count on, anyway. Orwellian is an understatement. But we were halfway there before Midjourney came along.

I rest my case from all those years ago. Naturally there are all sorts of blurry boundaries, but digital imaging is inherently a different thing from photography. And, eventually, we will come up with new language to tag it with; although we might stay a step or three behind the changes, same as it ever was.

Time for my breakfast! Thanks to those of you who signed up for Patreon, or upped your monthly give, for our 17th birthday and 10,006th post yesterday. I do need the encouragement, in my very young old age. We're going to try to keep this leaky old ship afloat for another trip around the sun.

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Brad Dow (partial comment): "I’m also super-sensitive to the cost of ink, and consider it carefully as I shop for a replacement for my aging Epson 4900, and I agree that the razor blade model is annoying. But I decided not to let ink cost distract me, because the cost of high-quality paper is on average about five times the cost of ink. Here’s the average ink cost for a letter-sized print with an 6x9 inch image:

Epson P900: $.26
Canon Pro-1000: $.21

"The cost of a letter-sized sheet of Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag is about $1.44. (The per 9x6 ink costs in my aging Epson 4900, with its 200 ml carts is only $.17. But there’s a downside to large carts for a low-volume printer. The ink in several little-used positions, especially for someone who prints mostly B&W, expires before I can use it up, and replacement cost is higher. I’d still prefer bigger carts, but this factor closes the gap somewhat.) In any event it’s a bit like the cost of darkroom print chemistry. It’s not trivial, but it’s dwarfed by the cost of paper."

Kristine Hinrichs: "For what it’s worth I spent a great deal of time deciding between the Pro-1000 and the Epson—and settled on the Canon. After a year of use, I am very happy with my decision. I have two suggestions—get one of the extra maintenance cartridges right away. You do go through them quickly and their availability is inconsistent—B&H limits you to two each purchase. I also generally better result using their print utility—Canon Print Studio Pro (not always, but usually). It works as a plugin for LR & PS. You probably know these things, but maybe not. Happy printing!"

robert e (partial comment): "The fake 'photograph' is disturbing enough, but people are hard at work applying similar principles to generate, for example, fake scientific literature."

Jeff (partial comment): "Epson relies on the user to trigger cleaning cycles. Canon machines automatically trigger cleaning cycles, whether the user wants them or not. So clogging might be reduced, but the cost per print is higher unless one frequently prints. This video explains the Canon approach. There are of course other differences in the Canon vs. Epson approach: user replaceable print heads (Canon) or not (Epson); feed mechanisms; ink sets and number of inks, etc. The Pro-1000 is also much bigger and heavier than the P900, if that matters."

Stephanie Luke: "The final print has always been the point for me. I started out in the darkroom, but, with the advent of digital, color became possible, and I never looked back. The best thing I ever found was a used flat file. It takes up a ridiculous amount of room in my small house, but I can store the multitudes of prints I've made over the years. Also, the top makes a good place to cut mats and frame (and reframe) prints. My output would never rise to the level of a master printer, but it provides me with a lot of satisfaction. I exhibit a few prints in various galleries most months, and sometimes people even buy them. I use an Epson 3880, and, yes, they can be a bit temperamental, but when it's functioning properly, it makes beautiful prints."

Ed. note: The above are samples of what Stephanie means by flat file, for anyone who might not know. They're for storing large sheets of paper such as maps, CAD drawings, blueprints, or artwork, and are used by engineers, architects, artists, collectors, etc. Uline [top] has metal ones, and old wooden ones can be found near you from sources such as Facebook Marketplace. Most are stackable, and sometimes have a variety of bases and tops available. Amish or Mennonite woodworkers either have or can make wooden ones [bottom]. Warning: they are hell to ship and move. New ones are often packed inadequately, and old ones can be beat up and have tape and so forth applied to the outside, or one drawer missing or sticking or what have you. And they do take up a significant amount of room. A headache to acquire but, as Stephanie says, great to have.

Timothy Gray: "Look, I ran an Epson Stylus Pro 7800 for 13 years, made many beautiful prints with it, and spend an embarrassing amount of time and money learning to print well. Don’t even get me started on paper jams, wasted ink from PK/MK swap routines and head clogs, trying consumables at up to $12/sheet in search of some 'holy grail' of printing. In the end, when it gave up the ghost, I had a helluva time finding anyone local that would haul it away. Even in death it was a major pain in the you know what. If you’re really dead set on buying a printer, start by gathering $50 bills. Better get 10 of them. Now take a look at one of the files you want to print, walk over to your fireplace and light that first fifty note on fire. Watch it burn and think about what that money could have gone towards instead. Repeat this process until you either come to your senses or run out of money. Sure it may seem foolish, but so is blowing your retirement hunched over a computer only to then watch as each print, full of ink that costs more per gallon than crude oil, slowly comes out of the printer."

Les von Pongracz: "Congratulations on breaking 10,000 posts. I think I've probably read more than 9,600 of such. Always looked forward to the latest from TOP and Steve's Digicams. I'm likely an 'advanced amatuer' in both photography and printing. The fly in the ointment is that I have several hobbies that I enjoy intensely. Problem is that I can't seem to distribute this fervor equally, so activity for each has peaks and valleys (maybe you can relate). Subsequently, there are prolonged periods of time when the printer may sit idle. I've had three wonderful Epsons over the years and each one cost me many dollars of ink clearing clogs, often occurring in as little as three weeks of being idle. Decided to go with a Canon PRO-100. (I know, it's dye ink, but I like it!) Have not had clog issue (unlike one of my arteries) in just under 10 years, and I've been using Precision Colors ink for the past five years. YMMV. There's an interesting, if somewhat pedantic, reviewer/tester on Youtube—Jose Rodriguez—check him out. I wish you luck with whatever choice you make, but do dive in, as printing is a very satisfying engagement."

Bill Poole: "Photo jargon! My least favorite innovation is 'capture' as a substitute for 'exposure,' or even 'shot' (of which I was never a fan, either.) 'Capture' seemed to come in with digital technology, to emphasize that the image was made digitally. Now we seem to be stuck with it."

louis mccullough: "Car manufacturers have been using graphics software for many years instead of actual photography to create images of their cars, etc. This is also happening in many other areas which used to be the mainstay of professional photographers."

Søren Engelbrecht: "To me, the difference between a 'photograph' and a 'digital image' is that a photograph must (to a very high degree of accuracy) show a representation of what was in front of a lens when a shutter was released. In those terms, you can take a photograph (say, a landscape picture will a dull sky) and click 'sky replacement' on the computer—after which it will no longer be a photograph, but a digital image. By extension, if there is no lens or shutter involved, only AI, it is not a photograph. After all, the Greek meaning of photography is 'writing with light,' so if the image was not created using light, it's not a photograph. At least in my book.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Yes. A photograph respects the lens image, is how I usually say it.

Joseph Vavak: "I have a Canon Pro-1000 and have been very happy with it. I don’t print a lot on a regular basis—most of my usage is in short bursts around exhibitions—but I try to print something every other week to avoid anything drying up. So far, so good. The B&W mode works well on a variety of papers. I generally reduce contrast on-screen to get results more along the lines of what I want. Printing on Canon papers in color is nearly foolproof without dealing with paper profiles, but it’s not hard to utilize paper profiles if you choose. A calibrated monitor is a must, as much for brightness as for color balance.

"It’s a big, heavy machine, just a warning."

Dave Millier: "On the ink costs thing, although it really galls emotionally, in practice, if you run the sums it's a minor component of the cost of hanging a print on your wall. I did my own rough costing and if you include ink, paper, mount card, foam core backing and an Amazon basics frame, the cost of a framed A4 print on the wall is about £20. Of this £20, £15 is the frame, 50p the paper. The extra cost of the ink and an amortised sum for printer depreciation is minor. And that doesn't include the camera, lens, time spent travelling and shooting and various other indirect costs. The ink costs rankles because it seems a rip-off and looms large because we get excited buying a new camera but not a new ink cartridge. Try and see beyond these irritations and put the ink cost into perspective."

The Printing Challenge

My print sale was modestly successful. I sold 23 prints to 18 people, and hereby thank them all. What it means is that my B&W camera is paid for—for which I'm very grateful. The very first sale I had, of "Wisconsin No. 7," somewhere in the 2005–2007 timeframe, paid for the camera I took it with, my first-ever DSLR. If you're curious, "Lake" was the most popular print, "Car" came second, and "Vultures," let us just say, was not as popular.

Now I have a challenge. How am I going to make prints going forward?

Ctein is probably too expensive for me. In the print size my 18 customers just purchased, he charges $350 for the first custom print (that's the one that soaks up most of the effort he described the other day) and $110 for each additional print ordered at the same time ($160 for additional prints made later). That's $460 for two prints. Those prices makes perfect sense for those who have any kind of purpose for their prints (sale, exhibition, etc.), but it's a steep price for a guy who just wants to take pictures and store them in a box, perhaps someday to have a show—at a loss, no doubt—at a local gallery.

I've always had a hate-hate relationship with inkjet printers—my first one(s), the ill-fated HP B9180, made beautiful prints, but it soaked up immense amounts of troubleshooting time, had to be replaced by the manufacturer twice, and never worked right. I don't think I ever got all four print-heads testing "green" all at once, not even one time. The B9180 basically put HP off pursuing that whole segment of the market—the company stopped making mid-level home pigment printers for photo enthusiasts not long afterward. And it put me off digital printing, if I'm honest. I have never since had a "good" printer for artwork that "took." I did try an early Epson, but the heads clogged immediately. Most recently, I killed an Epson P600 because I was too cheap to pay for the ink to run a test sheet every day to keep it unclogged; that one clogged too, and I had to put it out of my misery.

I have a real problem with ink costs. The model is the one devised by the accursed competitors of King Camp Gillette, called "the razor and blades model." King Camp Gillette (really, that was his name) didn't invent it; his competitors did. Whoever they were, I trust they're now roasting on a spit in the Devil's domain. I really, really hate being cheated that way. Including being remorselessly soaked for printer ink at $4,000 per ounce or whatever it is.

Computer printer manufacturers have gone through extensive efforts to make sure that their printers are incompatible with lower cost after-market ink cartridges and refilled cartridges. This is because the printers are often sold at or below cost to generate sales of proprietary cartridges which will generate profits for the company over the life of the equipment. In certain cases, the cost of replacing disposable ink or toner may even approach the cost of buying new equipment with included cartridges. Methods of vendor lock-in include designing the cartridges in a way that makes it possible to patent certain parts or aspects, or invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prohibit reverse engineering by third-party ink manufacturers. Another method entails completely disabling the printer when a non-proprietary ink cartridge is placed into the machine, instead of merely issuing an ignorable message that a non-genuine (yet still fully functional) cartridge was installed.

(from the Wikipedia article "Razor and Blades Model.")

A lot of what's called "marketing" is actually "cheating the customer in ways we can get away with." I learned of another one just the other day: people don't use dishwasher powder any more. Dishwasher detergent is now sold in "pods," which are merely dissolvable packets of...dishwasher powder. Not only are the "pods" sold for greatly higher prices than plain loose powder, but they are now "recommended" by the dishwasher manufacturers...despite being actually worse functionally* than plain powder! And the reason they're "recommended"? Because the manufacturers of the pods pay the manufacturers to do so. They called that "marketing," but it is in fact a plain swindle IMO. There oughta be a law.

This goes beyond just my own personal anger. In my judgment, this systematic exploitation by the printer manufacturers of people who print for anything but money has put a chilling effect on photographic printing in general, and is in part responsible for the decline of home photographic printmaking as an independent pursuit among amateurs and hobbyists. The way it is, the fewer prints you make, the less you get exploited. Obviously, the situation would be better for photography if it were reversed: the more you print, the more you save. That's the sales model of volume discounting. Whether I'm wrong or right about this chilling effect might be disputed, but at the very least the status quo has put a chilling effect on my home photographic printmaking—and that's germane to our topic.

Well, let's get past this digression.

The fact is that I won't buy another printer than doesn't at least offer minimally acceptable value for ink. That means at least the Epson P900 or Canon Pro-1000. A single replacement inkset for the latter, a $1,200 printer, can be ransomed for a cool $700, which in turn means I would have to sell a few prints of every picture in order to be able to afford the ink. I'd have to crunch all the numbers and come up with a break-even point; could I afford to print a picture if I could sell two or three copies of each? At what price? Does a market exist for my work that would get me to the break-even point? Having sold to just 18 customers in the maiden print sale doesn't bode particularly well for finding a clientele on TOP. Coals to Newcastle, I guess. So then I have to find a market for my prints outside of the blog. And where—?

Enough of this now; the point is that, as you can see, the business calculations are actually pretty formidable.

Then there's the complexity of installing and running such a printer. I don't have room on the porch where I work, so I would need to move my office to the family room of my house, a converted single-car garage in the back. Wi-fi doesn't currently reach back there, but a kind reader (all my readers are kind! As well as above average) just informed me about mesh systems. So, first, I would need to try that to see if it works. Assuming it does, I'd need to engage movers to get the couch to the porch and the sit-stand desk on the porch to the place the couch used to be in the back room. The former garage is not on the house heating system, but I might even save on heat by moving back there, because I could keep the house colder in the winter and just heat the office. Then it's a matter of getting everything set up and running in the back.

Looping back around to the printer, I'd actually need to do a pretty deep dive into B&W printing to see what the best printing method for B&W actually is. Then there's the question...could I actually learn to get a printer up and running, without all the ongoing anguish and difficulty I experienced with the B9180 all those years ago? Probably, but it's not a foregone conclusion. I have lots of history of accomplishing difficult things, but I also have lots of history of failing to reach intended goals, sometimes simply because I can't keep my interest up. Could I navigate the treacherous waters of home printing—and, must I?

Anyway, as you can apprehend, printing would not be a trivial challenge pretty much no matter which way you cut it. I'll tell you what, though. Having seen prints from my new B&W camera, I'm not going to be satisfied with just throwing JPEGs up on Flickr. That's nice enough, but it's the print that's going to be parked in my head as the endpoint for my process. Much more rewarding than an image on a screen.

Mike

*Really, because there are not one but two wells for detergent in the average dishwasher. The smaller one is for the first wash, which lasts about 15 minutes. The pod has no way to distribute powder to the first wash, so the first wash becomes just a rinse. Here's the skinny on all that, from Technology Connections, in two videos: the first and the second. Aakin turned us on to these the other day, and, as so often happens with TOP, I learned something new. I was gobsmacked, as our British brothers and sisters say, to learn that at age 65 I actually didn't know how to properly operate a dishwasher! (You need to fill the secondary well and run the hot water in the kitchen sink before starting it.) So cool.

Aakin replies: "I'm glad that was interesting! And yeah, it definitely changed how I use my dishwasher as well. It's so much more fixture now, as opposed to being an useless waste of space in my kitchen."

Featured Comments from:

Rand Scott Adams: "Printing is a pain in the butt. Unless you’re addicted to it. 'Hi, my name is Rand and....' Even then, it’s still a pain in the butt.

"It is also one of my most satisfying pursuits. It is the final step in being in complete control of my output. It is a skill that has allowed me to help other photographers achieve an 'in their hands' realization of their vision for an image. That's worth a bunch to me. It's fun. It’s satisfying in a way that's hard to explain. Printing my own work has made me a better photographer. I see things in prints I’d never see on even a large, accurate, calibrated professional level monitor. Putting together a state of the art, fully color managed, printing operation is expensive in both money and time. Adventure into large format printers (24" wide and above) and you exponentially multiply cost, and space requirements. Keeping the printing space dust free, at proper humidity and temperature is also a factor. Creating an adequate color-temperature-controlled print evaluation station is part of the package. And, even with the best modern digital printers, you can’t just let them sit. The time it takes to understand the process and become truly proficient is significant. To get from 'good enough' to master is a large investment in time, patience, materials, and perhaps most of all, 'learning to see what it is you’re seeing.' Printing is also a losing proposition. The demand for really fine prints was declining before COVID, and is all but dead now. None of this matters; 'Hi, My name is Rand and....'"

Jean Bienvenu: "Isn't there a middle way between using a world class printing master and doing your own? Engaging the services of a good printer who does this as a job and does it well (enough)? I am pretty happy with the guy I use here (not in the US so that won't help you) and he charges me a fraction of what Ctein would (OK, this is partly because I also live in a cheaper country than the US)."

Bob Keefer: "The solution is the excellent after-market inks out there. I've been running my Epson 7880 for years on ink from InkOwl.com, with no problems and plenty of excellent prints. Buying ink by the liter instead of by the ounce reduces the cost of operation to nearly insignificant. Epson tries to scare you away from doing this by having the 7880 give you frightening error messages when you use non-Epson cartridges. You can safely ignore them."

Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "Ugh. My most hated topic. I have an Epson something-or-other that has never fed paper properly. Each sheet has to be hand fed dozens of times to get it to register in the right place. I suspect some sensor inside is covered in dust. Also the heads were perpetually (at least partially) clogged. I did get some of Cone Editions' pink head cleaner, which kind of helped, sort of. Also a mixture of 100% rubbing alcohol and Windex, which also sort of worked. But generally I just look at the machine with undisguised loathing and become preoccupied with revenge fantasies which should embarrass any nominally civilized person."

Walter McQuie (partial comment): "Quality costs. I'm sure my prints aren't as good as Ctein's but better than the online printers. The experience of making my own prints is worth quite a lot to me. With said intangible benefit, I'm pleased with my printer and its ink needs, given that I'm able to sell enough prints to pay for the paper that my printing habit requires! Have a look this page at Red River for an analysis of ink costs."

Ed. note: The full texts of "partial comments" can be read in the full Comments Section, accessible at the bottom of the post or by clicking on the post title.

Franz Amador: "For B&W printing, probably the best and most economical system is a used Epson 3880 and the Piezography inks. I've been using this for a while and find it excellent. It does take some futzing to set it up, and you'll need a set of genuine Epson cartridges (empty is fine) to get the chips off of, but after that all you need to buy are the ink bottles, which last a long time. And I've not had clogging troubles even though I'm pretty lax about running test sheets."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'How am I going to make prints going forward?' You pose a quandary shared by many photographers! First, let’s dispel some of the 'fear of failure.' Printing at home has never been simpler. Ten-plus years ago print systems, inks, print drivers, monitors, etc. were all in constant flux. Today they’re far more stable, almost to the point where you’re nearly assured good results nearly from the start. But high-quality home printing is still a relatively costly proposition. My Epson SureColor P800 has been the best printer I’ve owned. It’s been very reliable and, thanks to WiFi, it can be sited anywhere in my home. But it has a big belly which must be periodically fed nine ink carts at around $55 ea., plus a maintenance dump tank. And that doesn’t even include paper, which can be $1–2/sheet depending on size and brand. Personally, printing represents a significant slice of my enjoyment of photography and I’d be loathe to give it up. But…Ouch!

"So back to you. Ctein is too costly…understandable, since he’s providing both printing and retouching services. If you just need a printer the world is your oyster. There are many high-quality photo printing services available online. As a few examples...Adorama acquired a good printing service called Printique (I have no affiliation with any print service!) some years ago. They’re located right in NYC and Brooklyn and are closely affiliated with the big Adorama photo superstore. On the other side of the country is the independent Bay Photo Lab, a very reputable printer dating back to the 1970s. I’ve never seen any disparaging remarks about their work! Overseas we have Whitewall, an excellent lab for large and specially mounted printing work that I’ve used. So with winter’s jaws fast-approaching I’d encourage you to experiment with one of the images Ctein just printed for your sale. You have a reference standard to compare against! Start yer' shucking'!"

Jean-Pierre Koenig: "I own the Epson P900 (my third Epson printer). It is fantastic and so much easier and more fun to use than the model it replaces. I would strongly encourage you to use it. The ink cost is not prohibitive I have found; I suspect the smaller droplets makes it more efficient. Replacing cartridge is expansive if you do it all at once, but in practice some only need to be replaced at any one time. Strongly recommended."

Gordon: "You only just touched the surface of costs for home printing. I belong to a small cooperative photo gallery in Sacramento where I try to keep a drawer of prints regularly updated. In order to do that you need to add the cost for archival mat board and fancy plastic sleeves. I recently had to purchase more 20x24 mat board and nearly fell out of my chair at the price. It had gone way up since my last purchase from the same vendor. These costs have taught—well, forced—me to be much more selective about the images that deserve all that expense. I don’t sell anywhere near enough prints to recoup the cost for all those I put in the drawer. As for printers, I’m on my second Canon Pro-1000. I had owned two Epsons previously and had no end of clogging trouble with them. So far the Canon has been fairly forgiving about my seldom printing. At least the Canon allows you to change the print head if it ever fails, although my guess is that if it came to that it might still be economically preferable to just buy yet another printer. Finally, while you might not think of it as such, there is an expense to just having the space to print, mat, and store photographs. We have an entire bedroom made into a dedicated office where our two desks, the printer, and several shelves of printing and mounting supplies are kept. We recently went looking for a new home and it was a requirement that we find one with enough rooms and space for all this stuff."

darlene: " I worked in advertising for a few years as an ad artist and was part of a team of creatives. I had to sit through many sales meetings with account executives and presentations with clients. I learned a few things from those experiences and applied them to my business. You never want to imply anything negative in your marketing campaign or transactions with prospective sales or clients. Negativity comes in all shapes and sizes. With that said, your 'Vultures' image would benefit from a different title for the general public, IMO. When I purchased the 'Vultures' print, I called it 'Circle of Life' (or something like that) because the title 'Vultures' makes me cringe. I guess you titled it after the birds in the picture, but you could have titled it something else. The word vultures can conjure up negative thoughts quickly, and you have about five seconds to grab someone’s attention. If you were selling a horror movie, yes, it would work to establish a thought of vultures eating flesh, but not to sell a beautiful image. I am not stomping on your creative license here; just suggesting marketing reasons. I understand your point about how marketing can cause misrepresentation or push people to purchase things they may not need (self-control IMO). Still, it can also help honest people market their products more effectively. It all depends on someone’s intentions."

Ed Hawco: "Six or seven years ago I posed essentially the same questions right here in this blog (in a comment). My fear was getting mired in arcane settings and endless tweaking just to get a nice print to put in a box (or maybe up on a wall).

"Ctein responded to my comment with a sparkling comment of his own, which can be paraphrased as 'get a good Epson printer, use the default settings, and tweak if you’re not happy but most likely you will be happy.' Best advice ever. I got an Epson 3880 and never looked back. I now have boxes and walls full of prints that I’m pretty happy with. Some have even been gifted and now hang on walls on three continents. I never expect to get my money back, but being able to print, and print nicely (on nice but expensive Hahnemuhle paper; my paper of choice) has been a wonderful experience. Having spent a lot of time in the darkroom back in the '80s and '90s I thought that learning digital printing would be a painful and arduous process, but in fact it was very (creatively) rewarding and not difficult. I would not put one of my prints up against a Ctein print, but I will happily put it up on my wall and call it my own. Sadly, that printer has broken down, so now I need to decide whether or not I want to buy another and continue, or to leave it behind as I once did the darkroom."

John Abee (partial comment): "I am thrilled that we are talking about printers. I have never given up printing and have been happy with my Canon printers and DIY cartridges after suffering through the same HP B9180 (twice) and a number of Epson horror stories, but my latest Canon is getting a little long in the tooth and I've started plotting my next move. Let's keep this discussion going."

Stephen Price: "Retired printer engineer here. About ink prices...I worked on really big 'production' printers. The last machine I worked on was a four-color machine that took three-liter cartridges of ink, and had two of each color so that when one ran dry, you could replace it without stopping the printer. I just looked up the current price. You can get eight cartridges (24L) for $1520 ($63/L), pigment or dye at the same price. That old machine has been replaced by one that takes 10L cartridges which sell for as little as $200 ($20/L). These are not photo-quality inks but it still boggles the mind how much ink costs for our small printers. I see B&H is selling P900 ink for $880/L. By the way, that newer printer runs paper at 494 feet per minute so it would blow through a 40,000 foot long roll in less than an hour and a half. Just think how quickly you could complete your printing chores!"

kirk: "From the commercial point of view as a working photographer no client has asked for a print in well over a decade. No friend or associate currently makes or sells prints. Prints are dead. From a commercial point of view. I gave away my last wide-carriage inkjet printer, an Epson 4000 Pro, over ten years ago. It made some nice enough prints but cost way, way, way too much to run, and clogged relentlessly. I no longer print in the studio or office. I send the corrected and profiled files to a service which outputs them on a printer that's good, and the inks are not on my payroll. But I do this so rarely, and only for my own use. You can't do everything. Send out the time consuming and frustrating stuff to a service. And the time consuming and frustrating stuff = printing. We're not in the 1980s anymore. The print is no longer the 'gold standard.'"

Eric Brody: "I fell in love with 'serious' photography as a teen and with time out for training, work, and children, still am. I recall John Sexton recalling the thrill of seeing a print 'come up' in the developer. I spent 40 years doing darkroom printing with everything from Minox to 4x5. Then I loved it; now, not so much. It seemed endless: make a print, make another, and then another and then another. What to do with all those 'almost OK' iterated prints?

"Now, with digital, I have no film costs, no chemical costs, just ink and paper. Not trivial but doable. I've been through a few printers and just got an Epson P900 when Roy Harrington, the author of QTR RIP, said it would work with QTR, my preferred black-and-white technique.

"When I did a workshop with my favorite teacher, Charles Cramer, the book he gives out is titled, 'Optimizing Images for Printing,' a telling title. Charlie is a master photographer and printer, and the best teacher I've had. He encourages printing sooner rather than later and reminds us that the screen is fundamentally different than the print. Now I make a print and, if it's not good enough, I adjust and make another. The print is the reference, not the screen. I no longer go through the endless iteration of the darkroom. It's common for the first print to be spot on (calibrated NEC monitor) or really close.

"So, as someone else said, 'it's not a photograph until you can hold it in your hand.' I completely fail to understand folks who spend a fortune on cameras and lenses and the show their images only on a screen. When our photo group has a print sharing, we all look carefully and slowly at the images for critique, not by some silly rules but rather on content, composition, and technique. That takes time. When we show images with a projector, they're on the screen for a few seconds, and can't possibly be evaluated properly. The photographer then misses out on a potentially helpful learning experience.

"So Mike, get a printer, learn how to use it, look at QTR or Cone inks to do your monochrome prints and you'll be happy!"

The Two Things You Need to Have a Print Collection

The first thing is, a box.

That's right, a box. An archival box. It can be a plain box or a fancy box, but you need a box—a box as big as the biggest print you reckon you'll want to include in it.

Here's my print box:
The second thing you'll need is to...take it down and look through what it contains every so often. Show your print collection to visitors. Share it with other photographers. Or just look through it yourself and enjoy it. A box full of prints that just sits there untouched is something you might as well not have. Enjoy your prints! Take the box down and look at the prints you've collected every now and then.

I actually have a bunch of boxes. But this is the "current" one, the one that's actively being added to.

That's it. Those are the two things you need to collect prints. Well, except for...some prints.

Mike

Featured Comments from:

Peter Komar: "Spot on Mike as usual about prints and viewing. I have several of that type of print box you shared, also several other types. I often go back and view them exactly as you noted. It not only motivates me to go out shooting, but it’s a great memory jog for me. Many of my prints are darkroom B&W and mostly were taken 40 years ago. I can still remember the locations of individual prints, camera type (there were many), film type, developer, etc. Once I start not remembering the details I will start to worry about old age and memory loss. I hope with your new B&W camera system you start filling up additional print boxes with prints that bring you inner joy."

Niels: "Any buffer sheet between prints? The few prints in my collection comes from various sources, not always something I can count on being a 'fine archival print.' I don't really know if I should worry about cross contamination from a poorly washed print, for example?"

Kenneth Tanaka: "In answer to Niels’s question, yes you should place an acid free sheet of liner between prints stacked in a box. Museums typically use glassine paper."

Jim Meeks: "When I worked at an art museum, we stored our prints in archival boxes like Mike's. We matted our prints to standard sizes and placed an acid free sheet between the print and window mat while in storage. That sheet was just slightly smaller than the size of the mat board. We also chose to use acid free paper with no buffering for interleaving, vs. glassine. I've read that glassine should be used for 3–5 years and then changed out. We used gloves for the most part, but other institutions prefer washed hands or neoprene gloves. We had a policy (which we recently discussed here) of display and rest. As for temperature and humidity levels, our standard was 70°F and 50% relative humidity. Most households can maintain a fairly constant temperature, but RH is hard to manage unless you have a very sophisticated HVAC system and a well-sealed house. I wouldn't worry about the latter; just store them the best you can."

Custom Printing: Threat or Menace?

Guest post by Ctein

I'd originally planned this as a comment to one of Mike's previous columns about our current print sale, but then I realized it was better as a standalone column. Still, think of it as a response to some of the excellent questions that several readers asked.

Understand that the questions aren't new ones—we've discussed them in the past, in fact at great length a mere dozen years ago. I am truly surprised y'all don't remember the details of those extended conversations (grin).

For those who are masochistic enough to want to review these longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] dialogues, the links are at the bottom of this column.

For the rest of us...

There's a very simple answer to the questions in the vein of, "Should or shouldn't I value a print made by the photographer more than a print made by somebody else?"

Do what your heart tells you!

News flash: Art is not a rational process. Loving art is not a rational thing. The marketplace for art is especially not a rational thing. Any attempt to philosophize your way to a logical answer is doomed to failure. All of you are right!

Jim Marshall prints
Let me give you an example of just how irrational the market is. I was Jim Marshall's color printer for the last decade of his life. In the last two years I finally convinced him to let me make digital prints as well as dye transfers. In most cases I was printing the same photographs in both media, because they were the popular ones, so we have a kind of controlled experiment here.

You would probably guess—correctly—that the dye transfer prints sold for many of thousands of dollars more than the digital prints, anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 more. Because, y'know, DYE TRANSFER (insert "ooooooooohhhh, aaaaahhhhh" here)!

By any logical metric, this should not have been the case. The digital prints were in most cases larger than the dye transfer prints. Technically they were unquestionably better, being more faithful to the tones and colors of the original slides—when that was the goal.

(An aside here, Jim worked almost exclusively with 35mm Kodachrome II and A. Those are Jim's "originals," and they have never been for sale. If you want a Jim Marshall photograph, you buy a print...made by someone like me. Which messes with a whole lot of arguments about originality and ownership, I would think.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. In addition, the prints were more true to Jim's intent and artistic vision, because of course I worked with him and he critiqued what I did. In some cases the changes were subtle, and others they were massive—the print of Johnny Cash in the studio is the only one of this photograph that was ever printed remotely correctly, because the studio had fluorescent lights that photographed as a bilious green.

So we've ticked off size, technical quality, aesthetic intent, and originality boxes. What's left, rarity? Because, you know...dye transfer (ooooohh, aaaahhh)!

Except...because we only got started on digital printing at the end of Jim's life, signed digital prints are far rarer. In most cases there are exactly two in existence—one in my collection and one in Jim's estate. Whereas there are between five and seventy signed dye transfers, depending on the popularity of the particular photograph.

By what logic does a Jim Marshall dye transfer print sell for much, much more than a Jim Marshall digital print of the same photograph? None, because it's not logical. It's not supposed to be.

Art has no intrinsic value—its value lies only in the pleasure it brings to us and we have no way to quantify that. (Thank the gods for that, because if we did some soulless capitalist entity would lock up the property rights and start charging us for it.)

If you did go back and reread all those oh-so-long discussions, you will of notice that they didn't resolve anything and that we are asking exactly the same questions today that we asked a dozen years ago. And, I have no doubt will be asking a dozen years hence.

To quote a great philosopher—"Don't worry. Be happy."

Should Mike print his own pictures?
Now, permit me to address the issues I can answer, raised by more than one reader:

1.) "Mike, you could save a lot of money by doing your own printing."

If Mike were to do his own printing, he would earn more money if he did this sale entirely on his own. The way this works is that he gets 60% of the net proceeds and I get 40%, because both Mike and I firmly believe that the artist should get the lion's share of money for their work. Still, Mike is leaving 40% on the table.

But consider that to get that other 40%, he would have to purchase all the materials, do the printing, do all the order tracking, do all the fulfillment, do all the shipping, keep the books, etc. That takes me about 85% of my time, easily more than half an hour per order when all is said and done. I doubt Mike could do it faster. [Ed. note: Mike certainly could not do it faster! Mike might not even be able to do it at all. That's an experiment you probably don't want us to run. —Mike]

Is that really how Mike wants to spend his time? Money is fungible but the 24 hours in a day aren't. And, as Mike recently wrote, "I'm 65, so the way I figure it, I get to live between zero and 40 more years...."

Mike has talked often about balancing the time he spends doing all the things he wants and needs to do. Do you think he really wants to add running print sales to that?

That is a rhetorical question.

(If you're thinking along the lines of, "Maybe Mike could do all the printing and Ctein could do all the order fulfillment, etc.?" Nuh uh—wouldn't save him much because I'd still need at least 30% rather than the original 40% to cover my time.)

2.) "Mike, you would get a better print, one more true to your artistic vision, if you did your own printing."

Nope. For one really simple reason. I'm a much better printer than Mike is. That's not immodesty speaking, that's accuracy. I do it for a living, and it's one of my areas of expertise. There are rare occasions when I don't do a single thing to the file Mike sends me to improve. It doesn't happen often. The great majority of the time, though, I am improving upon what Mike has created, by his artistic judgment. Not mine, his.

Sometimes the improvements are very subtle. Sometimes they are not. After I went in and "fixed" the "Wet Asphalt" photograph, entirely on my own initiative and intuition, Mike wrote this comment back: "That looks better than mine actually...I think I flattened the tone of the road a little too much. You added some more life to it and it doesn't detract from what I wanted the picture to do. And yours looks more like wetness."

I intuited the need for that wetness and I knew how to get there (it was very easy for me). I helped him realize his own vision for his own picture. It happens with a lot of my clients, even very famous ones.

In short, You won't be getting anything that Mike isn't utterly happy with. In truth, none of my clients ever do.

Because that's my job.

Ctein

Links:

"What is Custom Printing?"

"Do 'Real' Photographers Print?"

"Custom Printing and Artistic Ownership"

"The Importance (or Not) of the Print(ing)"

Ctein was was one of the world's few master dye transfer printmakers for many years. When Kodak announced the discontinuation of dye transfer materials, in 1992, he mortgaged his house and laid in a massive supply of dye transfer materials. He told me in the early years of inkjet that he would switch when digital inkjet could exceed the quality of dye transfer; before his supply of dye transfer materials had run out, he had switched. He closed his darkroom in 2013. He now makes custom digital inkjet prints for a wide variety of professional and private clients.

Featured Comments from:

Bob Johnston [no relation —Ed.]: "Anyone can make a print but it takes an awful lot of knowledge, effort and practice to make a fine print. This is just as true today as it was in darkroom days. Mike is very fortunate to have Ctein print for him."

William Schneider: "I believe that printing benefits from the 'two heads are better than one' principal. It is easy to overlook (or even wistfully ignore!) a printing decision made while working alone. In the past, another printer and I would meet twice a week to look over each other's darkroom prints. A fresh set of eyes could instantly spot issues to which I had become blind."

Jeff: "I’ve always made my own black-and-white prints, darkroom and digital. But I’m just an amateur enthusiast, not a professional requiring volume production. All of photography requires understanding of tools and techniques, but primarily depends on critical judgment and decision making. I would no sooner outsource my printing than I would my shooting. It’s all part of a whole, reflecting my skill and judgment, and the final framed print is my reward for the effort. When a print ‘sings’ (occasionally), that’s special. Sure, someone else might do it differently, or better, but that’s not the point for me. I especially enjoy deciding on the print size, typically smaller than others might prefer, and aspect ratio (where the edges are placed); what feels right for each picture. But the result isn’t final until I custom cut the mat for each print and assemble the framing. All mine, from start to finish, for better or worse. Joy.

"That said, I can surely appreciate why others take a different approach; no right or wrong. Seems that there has always been far fewer great printers than great photographers. I might not qualify as either, but I sure do enjoy the process and the resultant output. Meanwhile, my vintage silver print collection serves as aspiration and keeps me humble."

Daniele: "Thinking about it from my perspective, as a guitar maker, I can't put too much value on the autocracy of the art product: in my field, the end result is the performance (either recorded or live); it really needs both an instrument maker and a musician, both highly specialized in their profession. While technically and actually true that a maker can perform and a player build his own instrument, in practice it produces good results extremely rarely, if ever at all; great results, I can't think of any."

Color Management Made Very Simple (for Beginners and Others)

[There were several bad typos in this. Hopefully all corrected now, thanks to Jeff Schewe and Carl Weese and others. If you find something, please let me know. —Mike the Ed.]

-

Life used to be simple. You had sRGB and AdobeRGB, and you tailored your workflow to one or the other depending on the final destination of your pictures. Now there's P3 and other interlopers out there.

But we'll get to that.

First, if you are unfamiliar with color space, take a gander at this diagram. I shall then 'splain.

Common color gamuts (courtesy Myndex
Research, CC by-SA 4.0)

CIE 1931 is the big color blob in the background*. It basically graphs all the colors the human eye can see. The triangles superimposed on it represent a number of standard color spaces or gamuts. The CIE, or International Commission on Illumination, founded 1913, is the international authority on light, illumination, color, and color spaces.

Now then—in most still camera menus, if you navigate to "Color" or "Color Space," you'll see you have a choice of sRGB or Adobe RGB. The simplest form of color management, and one which works surprisingly well these days, is to set your camera on sRGB, shoot JPEGs at the best JPEG setting, view your images on a computer monitor that covers 100% of the sRGB color space (so you'll be seeing all of what your camera captured as you edit your pictures), edit in sRGB, and then export your pictures for viewing to the Internet. sRGB is the cookin' color space of the Internet. If you occasionally get a print made by one of the big commercial services, such as Shutterfly, Amazon Photos (I'm an Amazon Affiliate), Mpix, Snapfish, Printique, etc., you're still doing what you should, because all or almost all of those services calibrate to sRGB whether they tell you so or not.

If you don't shoot in sRGB and save your images as JPEGs, then you probably shoot raw. Raw is good. The advantages of raw are greater headroom, for corrections in post (post-processing, that is, in the image editing program), and better dynamic range. So why do we set our cameras to Adobe RGB if we're shooting raw, given that the raw file isn't tagged with a color space? Simply because it affects some of the camera settings, such as the histogram. The histogram and certain other affected settings will more closely represent the raw file if the camera is set to Adobe RGB.

But if we're printing at home, then we take the corrected raw file and convert it into Adobe RGB (or ProPhotoRGB). Or the editing programs we use do so. And here's why that is:

Courtesy ViewSonic

CMYK, as you probably know, stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key. "Key" means black, black being the key plate in a printing press, the plate to which the others are registered. CMYK are the basic colors used for the dots in printing presses as well as the basic colors of ink used in inkjet printers. Printer gamuts vary, but the graphs above makes it clear why we use Adobe RGB in preparation for printing. On the left we see typical printer CMYK colors overlaid on the sRGB color space, with the out-of-gamut colors filled in in black; and on the right, the same thing, but laid over the Adobe RGB color space. As this illustration makes clear, Adobe RGB can include many more of the colors available to the printer.

And that's why, if you're printing at home on a good pigment-ink printer like an Epson P900 or Canon Pro-1000, you want a monitor that's capable of showing 100% (or almost 100%) of the Adobe RGB color space. If you're only shooting for the Internet and perhaps Shutterfly et al., then sRGB is where you want to be, and that's when you can get by with a cheaper IPS monitor as long as it covers sRGB.

Color management made simple
Photography is a chain, and it's best to think of it that way. The standard term is workflow, or "the sequence of steps involved in moving from the beginning to the end of a working process" (Merriam-Webster), and I'm sure there are several words that would do as well—the "chain" means "the whole process from which camera you use to the final presentation of your image." The big advantage of specifying your own chain is that if you know where you want to end up, then you know where you have to begin, and what you need along the way.

If you conceive of a chain as a number of essential links, with each link having from two to hundreds of options, then there are many thousands of possible combinations. But let's take a look at two "chains" that reasonably typify two types of photography enthusiast, whom I'll label "hobbyist" and "maven." (Those aren't standard terms. You could make up your own names, such as amateur vs. advanced amateur.)

Hobbyist

Camera with APS-C or smaller sensor : kit zoom lens or in some cases a fixed** zoom lens : camera set to sRGB color space : shoot JPEGs set on "High" or "Fine" or whatever the top setting on your camera is : 24", 25", or 27" IPS monitor that covers 100% of the sRGB color space : basic free, low cost, or bundled Photo Editing program such as Corel AfterShot, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Photos for Windows 10, or Apple Photos : presentation through private device-to-device sharing or posting on the Web, augmented by occasionally having smallish prints made by one of the various printing services such as Shutterfly, Amazon Photos, Mpix, Snapfish, Printique, Costco (which still does prints online for members), etc., virtually all of which are standardized to work with sRGB files.

Maven

Camera with FF or larger sensor : selection of good-quality interchangable lenses : camera set to AdobeRGB color space : shoot raw : 27" or 32" IPS monitor that covers all or almost all of the AdobeRGB color space : at-home monitor calibration using a colorimeter such as the DataColor SpyderX : sophisticated purchased or subscription photo editing software that incorporates a raw converter, such as Adobe Lightroom, Phase One Capture One, DxO PhotoLab (which as of v.5 supports Fuji X-Trans files), or Corel PaintShop Pro, working in 16 bits : pigment-ink Canon or Epson home printer, commonly the Epson P900 or Canon Pro-1000 or higher : largish prints on fine papers such as Canson Platine or Epson Exhibition Fiber : stored in an archival clamshell box or museum solander case.

A simple way to control color is to settle on sRGB as your color space and JPEGs as your file type. Those are both camera settings: you choose them in the camera menu. It used to be that these choices sort of horrified the maven, who considered them inadequate. And they were, once upon a time. But that's dated information now. The fact is that JPEGs are very good with today's high-resolution cameras, and offer a reasonable amount of correction and recovery, and yield nice prints. If you need more, you'll know soon enough.

So what the heck is P3?
If you're shopping for monitors, one thing you'll come across is that some monitors don't specify the percentage of Adobe RGB they cover. Instead, they'll give the percentage of coverage for P3. What is P3?

Go back to the illustration at the top of the page. If you look at the P3 triangle, you'll see that it's roughly the size of the Adobe RGB triangle, but offset somewhat. P3 has its origins in DCI-P3, a color standard devised by Digital Cinema Initiatives, yet another group of experts like the CIE or the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created all the various JPEG standards), this one working for all the major movie studios. DCI-P3 is a standard for digital movies intended to be shown in darkened theaters. 

So then shouldn't P3 be called DCI-P3? Not so fast; it isn't, exactly. Back in the top illustration again, see those little dots labeled "~6300 white point" and "D65 white point"? The DCI-P3 color space specifies a non-standard, slightly greenish white point. Why? To take into account the characteristics of typical xenon-arc digital movie projectors!

Starting with the iPhone 7, Apple allowed for P3 tagging in images and videos, because, you know, video has been infiltrating and effing-up our previously cozy little still-photography universe for some time now. (Ahem. Editorializing, Mike?) But it didn't want a greenish white point. So it created "Display P3," which is DCI-P3 but with a standard 6500K (K in this instance standing for "Kelvin," not "Key") white point. "P3" is short for Display P3. In 2017, Instagram followed Apple's lead and now makes accommodation for P3 workflows.

So a monitor that specifies P3 coverage and not Adobe RGB is just a manufacturer acknowledging that the monitor is more likely to be used for video than for still photography. If you want to know how much of Adobe RGB it covers, it might be easy to find out, or it might not be.

End of P3 digression!

In summary
So if you are a phone shooter who wants to get more into photography, or a color photographer who has a good camera but is stumbling around in the dark when it comes to color management (that's been all of us at one point or another, let's not lie), the trick is to start from the final disposition you intend for your pictures and then work backwards from there. If you mainly look at your pictures on a monitor, send them in emails or texts to friends, and only occasionally have a print made by an outside service bureau (as they used to be called and might still be for all I know), then sRGB is for you. Set your camera on sRGB and shoot JPEGs, choose an IPS computer monitor that covers 100% of sRGB, and save your edited pictures in sRGB, and you are the master of all you survey. I would still recommend calibrating your monitor regularly (meaning, every two to six months), using something like the SpyderX. You might think this is excessive and extravagant for your modest mid-range camera and a modest workflow, but it isn't—it's what separates the adults from the juveniles***. The whole Internet is standardized to sRGB, and it's not only how they see you that is affected. How you see them is affected as well! Wouldn't you rather see pictures as professional content providers intend them to be seen? I should think that if you like photographs, you would. A decent-to-excellent monitor without regular calibration is like Bugs Bunny without a carrot. That's why the best monitors come with calibration hardware, in some cases built in.

If you want to print your own pictures at home, on the other hand, then set your camera to Adobe RGB, shoot raw, and have fun with your super-powerful editing program, your beautiful if high-maintenance home pigment printer, and especially, all those awesomely gorgeous papers we can buy now! (But if you can do all that, this particular article has been too basic for you.)

And if you really want color management made VERY simple, as the title of this post promises? Why, then, do what I do—shoot with a monochrome sensor and work exclusively in black-and-white!****

Mike

*Well, the x-y coordinates of it, anyway—CIE 1931 is actually a three-dimensional plot, the Z dimension being luminance. For every point on Z, there is a different and unique x-y.

**A fixed lens is one that is permanently attached to the camera, whether it is a zoom (variable focal length / angle of view), such as the excellent Panasonic LX-100 II, or prime (single focal length / angle of view), such as the excellent Ricoh GRIIIx.

***Formerly "the men from the boys," but no longer gender-biased.

****You laugh, but that may be the only way color management can really be made truly simple. As I said last week, "Color management is a strange subject—you can get by with almost any amount of sloppiness if you're a slacker, but if you want real precision, you can get very far into the weeds with it."

Featured Comments from:

ADDENDUM: As I tried to reaffirm at the end of this piece, color management is actually not simple. But I disagree in substance with commenter Patrick Dodds, who writes, "Somewhere in all of this, the fun starts to dissipate." My experience in photography over many years is that you just do what you have to do in order to do the work you want to do. Cartier-Bresson said that it took him three days to master the Leica. When digital matured, Peter Turnley bought two DSLRs and hired an expert to help him master them; they put in three long days of intense work until Peter knew enough, and then he resumed his photography, picking up where he left off with film. Mark Klett managed to master Polaroid Type 55 Positive/Negative film, a touchy and cantankerous material that offered limited control, making beautiful and distinctive work with it (actually, come to think, he was the only one I know of who did). Richard Misrach  felt he had no choice but to tame Cibachrome by mastering masking technique. It really doesn't matter where the difficulty arises; you just have to master your materials and methods to the degree you feel you need to. The corollary is that you don't have to master what you don't need: learning a great potpourri of techniques you'll never use is just a distraction, a different pursuit than the pursuit of pictures.

Again and again in my life, meeting great and good photographers, I found that most were deep masters of the specifics of their chosen techniques and surprisingly ignorant of others. That extended even to pros—I've written several times (because it amused me) about a studio pro I worked for who had $150,000 worth of pack-and-head strobes and other sophisticated lighting equipment in his studio and didn't know bupkus about on-camera thyristor flash units that mount to the hot shoe—the items most people call "a flash." He didn't use them. He knew nothing about them. He knew what he needed to know.

Almost no matter what "chain" you use, you will encounter specific questions and specific difficulties. You just need to keep gnawing at them until you either understand, or have to give up, or find a workaround. Technique is part of photography. We persist: we keep after it until we get it. Mastery is mandatory. Simple or involved, up-to-the-minute or antiquarian, narrow or broad, prestigious or "low-fi," highly technical or anti-technique—it doesn't really matter. All that matters is the work. Figure out where you want to end up, and then keep learning until you know how to get there. Just my suggestion.

Featured Comments:

Ernest Zarate: "Re '…the trick is start from the final disposition you intend (for your pictures) and work backwards.' In my 67 years, I have found that this approach works in many situations. Have used it for decades, and found very satisfying results. I stumbled upon it when I noticed a lot of people worked the other way: they’d get something and then try like hell to figure how to get it to do what they wanted. A very frustrating experience. Good article, Michael, with a terrific way of making a lot of this accessible."

Phil: "Thanks for this, Mike. It fills in several gaps in my knowledge about colour spaces, etc. And now I'm convinced, I really should get a calibrator for my monitor."

Mike replies: You really should. There's a reason many of the best monitors come with calibration hardware, or, in the case of the upper-range EIZOs, have it built in. The trouble is that there's not a lot of positive reward; it merely prevents a negative penalty. So there's not a lot of reinforcement for what feels to most like an excessive expense.

Monitors really run the gamut, no pun intended. Bad ones are remarkably horrible (well, for photography anyway), and good ones can be impressively wonderful. I'm working to write an article about how to buy an inexpensive monitor, but, after composing a list of minimum requirements, I've struggled to find a specific model that encompasses them all. Each one seems to have one little area where they skimp to an unacceptable degree on something—color space, bit depth, resolution, something. Different models skimp in different ways, but none of them quite come all the way up to my chosen minimum standards. Then I'll find one—only to discover that it isn't exactly cheap! I've been calling manufacturers and reading spec sheets till I'm bleary-eyed. It's really hard.

Niels: "Thanks! Now I don't feel as bad shooting JPEG only. I always get shamed if I mention that on an online forum. I didn't see the benefit of shooting RAW, only storage cost and wasted time in front of the monitor, so I stopped a few years ago."

Mike replies: I believe Ken Rockwell shoots JPEG-only as well. I've shot raw since Bruce Fraser's book came out many years ago, and still do, but I think JPEG in most camera is a much better option now than it was then.

David Haynes: "Many comments on this post mention ProPhotoRGB, which is the largest color space available in Photoshop and most other photo editing programs. I fit best in the 'Maven' category and shoot raw, use DxO PhotoLab to develop the raw files (exporting to ProPhotoRGB 16 bit), use ProPhotoRGB while editing, then convert to AdobeRGB for printing or sRGB for online uses. Photoshop is my primary editing tool, but my workflow includes quite a few other programs or third-party filters (Escape Motions, Topaz Labs, and so forth). I have found that using ProPhotoRGB while editing allows the tools to output the widest range of color, even though some may be 'out of gamut' for both the screen and printer. Converting to AdobeRGB for printing, or sRGB for the web, takes care of that. Perhaps I am going overboard and not really gaining anything by using ProPhotoRGB. However, the workflow works for me, and that is the bottom line."

Moose (partial comment): "Color management is fairly easy, if you don't care about absolute accuracy. Were I a catalog photographer, this would be crucial knowledge and skill. My employers would not want returns; 'Not the color in the catalog.' An argument may be made for photographing art for reproduction. But, do I want to have the reproduction in a book to look like the original in the quite dim, oddly balanced lighting in many museums these days? Or perhaps in the lighting in which, for which it was originally painted? In the bright lighting museums used to use, to make the art pop. Same problem with color portraiture. Hold up print next to subject; but our skin colors vary, with age, time of day, health, and so on, and is it in the light in which the photo was taken? Who can know exactly what color that dahlia, that house, that goldfinch, those fall leaves, that water, actually was? The answer is no one. Then (sigh), if you follow recent developments in human vision, it becomes clear that we see color in a very different way than do cameras. It is far from the neat, three color model we tend to imagine.

"It seems valid to me to adjust the photo, including color balance, saturation, etc. to reproduce what I saw in my mind's eye, even as I knew the camera would not capture than, but would capture the raw material for creating something close to it. So, sure, a reasonably well calibrated monitor, and decent printer profiles, etc. are useful, but not worth obsessing about."

Mike replies: That's very true. But if your "chain" of equipment, materials, and methods are giving you fits, and actively frustrating you, such that you're not able to "adjust the photo, including color balance, saturation, etc. to reproduce what you saw in your mind's eye," then rudimentary color management might be the thing that makes things easier. All a matter of balance, though, I agree.

'In a Printer Mindset, the Screen is an Intermediate Tool'

Christer Almqvist wrote: "I plowed thru my computer files and found this: Ctein on digital printing:

Optimizing for the screen and optimizing for the print are two very different processes. The color spaces of a slide and of a print are quite different. What you see on the screen is not what you will see on your print, even using soft proofing. You need to process your files in a way that doesn’t always look good on screen but will be optimal in the print. In a printer mindset, the screen is an intermediate tool. Never get invested in what you see on the screen. I recommend you simply pull up an image you like on your screen, straight out of camera, and make basic edits and corrections. Just get the tone and color roughly correct; don’t try make it look perfect on screen. Print that photograph in A4/letter and let it lie a little. When you come back to it, note what you don’t like about it. Is the contrast wrong? Too dark? Too light? Does it need dodging or burning-in? Write notes on the print; use it as a learning tool. Go back to the computer and correct what doesn’t feel right on the print. Then print again, let it lie and re-evaluate it. After you’ve printed three or four of these, the picture won’t look good on screen but the print should be much better than the first version. As I said, with time and experience, you will be able to make perfect adjustments in just one or two iterations.

Mike adds: It's good to remind ourselves of this in the discussion about monitors and calibration. I'd venture to say that there comes a time in every printing process that you have to let go of any by-the-numbers approach that is only meant to get you close, and look at (and "feel into," as my ex-gf would say) the picture in front of you, and then give it what your best judgement says it needs—regardless of what the numbers say. I have a print I love of the "green light" before a thunderstorm, and if I "correct" it according to calibrated neutrality, it robs it of any sense of that greenish light. I know the green in the print is technically overdone, but in that particular image it captures the magical and elusive feel of that particular light very well. It looks and feels like the way I experience that light.

I think this happens to figurative artists too. They paint according to the reality of what they are looking at, or whatever their visual source is, but at some point they have to let go of the real world, or the pretext, and start looking at the painting and letting their sense of it dictate how they proceed. I know I personally use my well-developed sense of the real light in real scenes as a strong guide of where to take the print, but there often comes that time when I need to let go of my memory of the reality of the scene and look carefully and well at the print, take it as a thing in itself, and give it what I think it needs, or heighten the effect that I want to emphasize. That might entail a departure from the strict reality of the light or a literalistic description of a scene.

Mike

P.S. Just as an aside: Don't you wish Ctein would write a textbook on digital printing? I do. He demurred years ago because the hard- and software was too volatile and the products that would have to be discussed got out of date too quickly. But it seems like things have settled down sufficiently that perhaps a book might work. One solution to the problem of evolving products could be to get Epson or Canon to subsidize the book, which I visualize as being about the size of Canon's EF Lens Work III. Of course then the examples would be limited to that company's own products—but the upside of that is that then it could be up to the company to keep it updated in successive printings. Are you listening, Epson? (Ctein uses Epson printers, inks, and papers, so that would be the natural pairing.)

Featured Comments:

Keith B.: "There is no further elaboration of digital printing needed beyond what's in the Ctein quote. (Ctein was right that the world of software and hardware is too fugitive to make a book practical.) The calibrated monitor gets you closer than a junk monitor, but the operator almost always has to tweak and adjust to get the print to look the way he or she wants."

Rob de Loe: "I would say, 'Yes, but....' I think Ctein's advice is solid, but it's easy to go off the rails because of errors in one's printing process. One wrong setting in the journey to clicking the 'print' button can send you back to making all kinds of unneeded or inappropriate corrections to what you're seeing on the monitor. A case in point is a lot of fiddling to 'correct' what I saw in the print, when most of what I saw in the print was due to me forgetting to apply the right ICC for that paper. My friendly amendment to Ctein's advice is to add, 'Assuming that you're sure the print is set up properly....'"

Geoff Wittig: "I have never made a darkroom print, never personally developed a roll of film. My first printing experience involved using Hewlett-Packard's first generation slide scanner and Epson's first serious pigment printer, the 2000P, which had truly ghastly metamerism issues. Yet I am very fond of Ctein's book Post Exposure, which details his incredible darkroom chops and his philosophical approach to printing. His logical, methodical approach is a revelation. I would consider sacrificing a limb for the digital printing equivalent."

Open Mike: The Proof Prints Arrived, and...

"Car Coming" at 15x20 inches, first proof from Ctein

The proof prints for the monochrome print offer arrived yesterday evening, and...

It was a momentous life event for me, no fooling. I took a short look at the big prints and I knew it. "This is the way I'm going to work for the rest of my life."

I had been apprehensive about seeing the prints, because I've been enjoying shooting with the monochrome Sigma camera* so much that I had some trepidation about how the prints might look. If they revealed flaws or shortcomings in the equipment—to my very personal definition, mind you—it wouldn't necessarily have been the end of everything, but it would have thrown cold water over my happiness about the shooting I've been doing since late August. And my feelings about the Sigma fp(m) and its workflow.

Thankfully the opposite happened. The prints are beautiful. I like them better than I thought I would. They're very much like 16x20-inch prints from 4x5-inch negatives—not exactly the same, because the two media are very different, but, remarkably, not very far off, either. I love 'em!

Ctein and I have a little tweaking left to do before they're perfectamundo, but they're very close, close enough for me to know what I need to know. And he gets there, because that is what he does. (Before we're through, I'll explain the process of working with a custom digital print maker.)

A big moment in my life, then, yesterday evening, when I opened the package from California. I'm 65, so the way I figure it, I get to live between zero and 40 more years (the oldest human in the U.S. just turned 115, but 95% of super-centenarians are women; for men, by and large, the jig is up by the age of 105. No, I don't guess I'll live that long—it's the outer edge of the range of possibility). More realistically, my life expectancy is 18.1 years, according to the Social Security Administration, who have some data on the subject. Give or take five years, say, for good or bad luck. Well, for whatever portion of that time I remain vigorous and sentient enough to be photographically active, I've found the way I want to be working.

And I'll tell you what: I'm going to be grateful for it every single day. No kidding. Ansel Adams said, in The Negative, 1981, "I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them." I remember reading those very sentences when they were newly published back in '81. (The Negative was inspirational for me, as it was for so many others.) Now I live in the future. Now I live in that future. I get to carry around a handheld "4x5" that yields gorgeous, gloriously detailed, exceptionally sharp, tonally lovely prints, and I don't have to develop the film(!). That part tickles me—if you only knew how much film I have developed by hand in my life, and how much time I spent doing it.... And I get to put my virtual large-format camera on a tripod only when I feel like it. Science fiction, plus a little daydreaming thrown in, from 1981.

So yesterday was a red-letter day in my life. No joke, I'm being totally sincere. Stay tuned to TOP for the details about this print sale.

Mike

*For those who haven't been following along, last August, Jason M. loaned me his Sigma fp rig converted to B&W-only by Monochrome Imaging Services in Vancouver, and I subsequently bought my own. I've been getting to know it ever since. I also received a Leica Monochrom on loan from Chris H., and yes, we will be doing a comparo...I've been reluctant to, only because I can't afford a Monochrom and, if the Monochrom is better, I kinda don't want to know it! But we will investigate sooner or later, don't worry, for those of you who are more interested in the Leica solution.

Featured Comments:

Jim Roberts: "Very happy for you Mike. As one who has enjoyed your writing for many years, here’s to the next forty!"

Greg: "A while back I had two 16x20 prints exhibited side by side: one made from a 4x5 negative on fiber based paper, and the other made with my Nikon D850 and printed with an Epson 7800 printer on high quality paper. Not one person was 100% sure which was which including a handful of photographers."

Jim: "I completely understand your excitement and satisfaction of seeing your prints, Mike. For years, I made black-and-white photographs using a Calumet C-1 8x10" and a 300mm Schneider Krueznach lens on Plus-X 4147. My version of OCOL, but for many years. Anyway, I had only seen them as contact prints. In 2004 I moved to Alexandria, Virginia and decided to have a negative scanned and a large print made. I had a 30x40" print made; when I first saw it, I got a lump in my throat as big as a goose egg! It was so astounding I could hardly wait to share with everyone I knew! I hope you will continue to share your excitement and enthusiasm over this new chapter."

Hand-Coloring Photographs

The hand-coloring of photographs, an anachronism when I was younger, was a tiny niche. And it's probably one to two orders of magnitude tinier now than it was back then. Ctein used to say you could fit all the dye transfer printers in the world into one large living room. Might the same be said of hand-colorists today? Maybe not, but you could fit them all in the same movie theater, I would bet, and they wouldn't come close to filling up a football stadium—even socially distanced. Those are purely guesses. What I'm saying is that I would doubt one Photo-Dawg in a thousand regularly does hand coloring in 2021. Maybe one in ten thousand.

I never liked hand-colored photographs much. Younger-Me/Snarky-Me called it something like "a lot of labor to ruin perfectly good B&W prints with bad color," but that's way too harsh—my particular taste isn't a virtue, and, anyway, Older-Me has far more tolerance for things people think are fun to do. After all, my old "Photo 101 technique" that I thought was so stripped-down and straight-ahead back when it was current is now completely anachronistic itself. It's a niche too, and a very small one as well. Heck, I don't even practice it any more.

In any event, the people I knew who were into hand-coloring enjoyed it first and foremost. Partly or mostly, they did it because it was fun. If you're curious about it, B&H Explora has a nice article by Allan Weitz called "The Basics of Hand-Coloring Black-and-White Prints." He did a subtle job of hand-coloring that great shot of the man with the model boat, didn't he? Although I would have left the details on the walls alone. But let me ask you two questions: 1.) Do you really prefer the hand-colored version to one or other of the B&W versions? and 2.) Might it be six-to-one/half-a-dozen-the-other just to take the picture in digital color and desaturate the colors?

Still a great shot.

Japan
If you like the look of old-timey color, I notice Taschen has just released the third in its 1900 series:

Japan 1900: A Portrait in Color. It's a BAB—big-ass book—but if you're into what it offers it'll be like a wallow in a vat of chocolate. Even if it's not hand-coloring per se, it's got the look.

Mike

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Yonatan Katznelson: "I prefer the warm-toned B&W, but the painted one is nice too. It reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting."

Lothar Adler: "I think Jan Saudek very much deserves to be mentioned in the context of colorized B&W photography, especially since this technique had a very large part in his artistic work, even if his often 'very special' nudes are not to everyone's taste. After all, we are talking about photography and a particular technique, and Jan Saudek used both intensively."

Frank Gorga: "Hand-coloring certainly has a place in the spectrum of this art we call photography. It most definitely provides a unique look in a photograph. Over the past winter, using some pandemic-induced free time, I experimented with hand-coloring inkjet prints using Prismacolor pencils blended with a mixture of turpentine and vegetable oil. The details of the method (including the book from which I learned the technique) and some examples can be found on my website (see: http://gorga.org/blog/?p=4921 and http://gorga.org/blog/?p=4943 ). I have since learned that Marshalls sold (and probably still sells) the materials for this method of hand coloring, as well as their more commonly known oils and dyes."

Bob Johnston [no relation to Ed.  —Ed.]: "The 'colour not having to fill the boundaries' is what made colour broadcast TV possible. There was very little bandwidth available for the chroma information. If you saw just the chroma part of the signal it looked like crude splodges of colour, but put in the luminance and you wouldn't see how bad the colour was."

Mike replies: One example of an exception is something I watch: pool. Check out this '90s TV broadcast. Start this at about 22:30 and look at the warm-colored balls. The orange especially is a "crude splodge." Poor-quality broadcasts can make it almost impossible to know what ball you're looking at.

Madonna and Helmut (Jeff Markus)

I didn't want anyone to miss this great comment, about print size.

Jeff Markus writes: "When I was assisting and printing for Norman Seeff his standard print was 16x20, from 35mm Panatomic-X negs. Image size came in at about 13x19. This had been his standard procedure for many years by the time I started working for him. He originally came up in the business by designing and shooting record album covers, 12x12 inches, so this sizing gave him anywhere from a slight to a large reduction for repro, thus maximizing quality.

"Another consequence of this sizing is that a person's face in a tight shot becomes life-size, or even a bit larger. The impact of this can be surprisingly powerful. And if the shot is a group of maybe half a dozen band members, each of their faces is large enough to be easily read.

"The common practice at that time was for portfolio prints to be no larger than 11x14, the theory being that you didn't want to piss off art directors by making your book too unwieldy. Norman's was 16x20, with about three dozen prints in it, and was a real handful. I do remember at shoots seeing some AD's struggle with that monster, but its visual strength was undeniable.

"When I was printing for Helmut Newton his usual print was 11x14; negs were Tri-X Pro out of a Hasselblad. This worked well for magazine repro and he said he just liked the size. His older 35mm negs worked well at that scale too. He was still putting out Newton's Illustrated at that time, which was larger than the usual magazine format. 11x14 reproduced with a slight upsize for full-page photos gave Helmut the look that he wanted.

"One magazine job varied from this a bit, and the result was quite unexpected, to me, at least. He shot Madonna for a spread in Vanity Fair, as a tough leather-girl with a knife, and she had final approval for any images of her that would be published. It was rare at the time (late '80s) for celebrities to have this as a contracted right...Helmut would have to send her a set of prints of his choices for her to okay. We couldn't send his set because they had to go to the magazine; we were on deadline and they might be damaged or delayed. Helmut asked me do another set, but as 8x10's.

"To my surprise, the smaller prints transformed the images into something completely different. They became delicate and gem-like, precious, very unlike any other Helmut Newton prints I have ever seen, or made.

"I sent them out to Madonna late in the afternoon and they were returned the next morning, all approved. The tough girl had rated them by preference, with one to four little red hearts on the lower right margins."

As a former pro custom B&H exhibition printer, I can tell you that if Jeff printed for Helmut Newton and Norman Seeff he's a heck of a printer. Both those photographers were noted for their superb prints and high standards. (If you don't know the name Norman Seeff, he shot the cover photo of Joni Mitchell's masterpiece "Hejira," the famous shot of the young Steve Jobs sitting cross-legged with the original Macintosh in his lap, and the well-known photo of a laughing Ray Charles with the piano keys reflected in his sunglasses. And many more. By the way, younger readers can mock, but I truly miss album covers. They were a brightly-lit shop window for the work of so many photographers).

Thanks much for the tales, Jeff.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Helcio J. Tagliolatto: "Among TOP readers there are great stories of life and profession, waiting to be revealed."

David Saxe: "In the early '60s, Bluenote and Prestige jazz record albums were some of my first photographic influences. There is even a great book, The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff which includes some of their best covers."

Leo Kawczinski: "I love these sorts of posts. They remind me of the depth and breadth of TOP's audience and the experience that informs the comments."

Tom Dills: "Not only do I miss album covers, but I also miss the liner notes."

Print Crit: Simple Means

With all the attention we give to good cameras all over the Internet, it's funny that you don't actually need a good camera to be a good photographer.

A reader who prefers only to be known as K.C. sent me a tiny print that turns out to have been made with very modest means. He's been doing an OC/OL/OY project with an Apple iPhone XS, printing his favorites with Fuji Instax Mini Instant Film on a Fuji Instax Mini Link printer ($99). In 2021, it's kinda tough to get more basic and simple than that.

The sample he sent me, properly set in a mat of just-right proportions and sheathed in a sized Mylar sleeve, is certainly one indicator of success in the project:

The first task when shooting this way, of course, is finding images that work at the print's very small 1 3/4 x 2 3/8 (4.45 x 6 cm) size. That's a challenge, because not all images work small. Then, assuming an image has the power to draw the eye at that size, there's the problem of providing something more than just that simple eye-catching design. "Philadelphia—Italian Market," K.C.'s title for the picture, has that—a lovely graffito that says "NARROW STREET," light-on-dark to contrast with the dark-on-light shadow of the signpost. So there's something that rewards the eye on a closer look.

I like the divisions and balances of the design, like the brick details of the sunlit side near the corner and the way they echo the bricks showing through at the upper left. I like the color palette, simple but harmonizing.

The print is one that further illustrates a point I'll make later this week in another print crit.

I don't want to go on and on here; this isn't complicated. It's not a big deal, pun intended. But it's sensitively done and well realized despite its modest origin, and it has a coherence as a physical object that a lot of prints lack. I like it better now than when I first laid eyes on it, always a tough test with me. So, from me, a great big pat on the back to this little tiny print, and to K.C.

Mike

K.C. replies: Hi Mike, Thank you for your very kind words.

One of the silver linings of being stuck at home during COVID has been the opportunity to explore my neighborhood, Philadelphia's Italian Market. I'm consistently surprised by little scenes like this that feel like they are frozen in time. Taking on the OC/OL/OY project during COVID has been a nice motivation to stay creative even while being home most of the time. It's provided encouragement to pay attention to details that might otherwise be overlooked.

The Instax printer has been challenging to work with; it tends to push tones to the darker end of the scale. However, with some practice and a few tweaks to files before printing (adjusting black point, decreasing dynamic range) it's possible to get surprisingly nice results. Best of all, printing can be done from the comfort of my sofa, which is perfect for the OC/OL/OY project. I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the print! —KC

Book o' This Week:

Pulitzer-prizewinner Isabel Wilkerson's greatly lauded book Caste: The origins of our discontents, a rare non-photography-related recommendation, might be the book of the historical moment in the United States. The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. Here's the book at Amazon Canada. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Fred Haynes: "K. C. has a good eye! The most important tool for any photographer."

Patrick Dodds: "Sometimes a picture is cleverly and beautifully seen. This is one of those times."

Stan B.: "Love it!"

Sharon: "I would definitely buy that. I like the photo a lot."

Keamu: "That is very well done. Brilliant. Kudos to KC."

Rodolfo Canet: "Frankly, I'm very impressed. I like the photograph, the presentation and the whole idea!"

Pi Manson: "Mike, thank you for doing these Print Crit posts. They are absolutely my favourite posts on your wonderful blog."

Print Crit: Jim Arthur's Owl

Jim Arthur's owl

Are you one of those who feel that cards—greeting cards, Christmas cards, etc.—are not suitable or prestigious enough as a medium for fine prints? If so I'm pretty sure I don't agree. I like photographs, and I like them whether I see them in books or magazines, prints on the wall, or even—gasp!—on the internet. I think I like nicely printed books and nicely printed prints the best. Into that select company I might also admit handmade greeting cards. More demotic, more democratic, sure, but that's nothing against them.

Jim Arthur didn't mean this as a "Print Crit" submission when he sent it to me—I had to ask him after the fact if he minded me writing about it. He graciously consented. Inside the card, he had tried to convince me to not throw it away for two days by repeating an exchange from "Seinfeld":

Jerry: It was a 'thank you' card from Kristin because I'm doing the PBS drive. I mean, how long am I supposed to keep it?
George: The rule is a minimum of two days.
Jerry: You making that up or do you know what you're talking about?
George: I'm making it up.

On the contrary, I actually wish I had a box full of the best cards I've gotten over the years. There have been some beauts. Sally Mann used to write letters in pencil on the back of 8x10 contact prints that she would then fold and stuff into an envelope. David Vestal made Christmas card prints every year, tiny three-inch enlargements from 35mm negatives on gelatin silver paper inside a folder of translucent tissue paper; Oren Grad followed David's lead and did the same for a number of years. Kent Phelan used to send beautiful cards, and Nick Hartmann did too. Ansel Adams and Helen Levitt wrote on printed postcards made of their own photographs. I've gotten so many nice cards from readers over the years. Many of them are extremely nice homemade prints.

Not all images work small, and here I think Jim has excelled—his detail of an owlish scowling visage is perfect for a card, giving a "big" impression in a small space. That, at least, is something you can see perfectly well in the snap of it above. The image is beautifully printed, with strong detail and great clarity and no artifacts. It's maybe a bit more contrasty than you might make it as a more sober wall piece, but that just makes it jump out at you properly as a card.

I think the things I like best about it are the implied humor—those startling owl eyes glaring at you in apparent fury—and that trick of seeming big even though it's small. It was taken with a Canon 6D and EF 100–400mm ƒ/4.5–5.6L IS II lens at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, "a 98-acre zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, natural history museum, publisher, and art gallery founded in 1952. Located just west of Tucson, Arizona, it features two miles of walking paths traversing 21 acres of desert landscape" (Wikipedia). It's a Great Horned Owl. Jim didn't supply any of the printing details.

A well-judged image choice for a card, and perfectly nicely printed for purposes. Strong job all in. George Costanza was wrong—I'll probably keep it a minimum of six months, just to enjoy, and it might hang around here for two years before it goes the way of all cards and gets lost in the shuffle.

I like cards!

Mike
(Thanks to Jim)

ADDENDUM Thursday a.m. (it's October!) from Jim Arthur: After a long and stressful day preparing my Dad for a move to memory care I plopped down at the computer looking for a distraction and found your kind words. Thanks Mike, you really made my day.

The card was printed on a PRO-100 which uses Canon’s ChromaLife 100+ inks. The paper is Canon's inexpensive MP-101 matte paper. While I like the look of the prints, the 45 lbs. weight of this paper is a little thin for anything but greeting cards.

I never pass up an opportunity to make a greeting card. It's quick and fun and the recipients always appreciate finding a handmade treat among the bills and advertising choking their mailbox.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Frank Gorga: "Jim's owl photo is great! After having read, here at TOP some years ago, about David Vestal's tradition of sending small prints to friends at the holidays, I began a similar tradition. This year will make the ninth year I have done this, so I think it really has become a tradition! The recipients are always appreciative and there are at least two mini-galleries of my photos out there in the world. One friend has all of the prints pinned up on a cork board in his home office. A neighbor keeps three or four of the prints on a shelf in her kitchen. It is gratifying to know that a few people like them enough to want to keep looking at them. In years past, I have sent a 5x7 inkjet print, usually black and white, printed on half of a letter-sized sheet of paper. These fit in a readily-available 6x9-inch envelope with a piece of cardboard for stiffening. This year, having pandemic-induced time on my hands, I have taken to making cyanotypes again after a twelve year hiatus. Thus, I am toying with the idea of sending 4x5 inch cyanotypes this December. I'll need to get my you-know-what in gear soon if that is going to happen!"

John: "I maintain the David Vestal tradition, which he got from Sid Grossman at the Photo League. Four small analogue prints on an 8x10 sheet, then whack 'em through the guillotine. Many end up stuck to fridge doors or on pinboards for surprisingly long periods. What is really interesting is how many get carefully kept for years. Last year, at a motorway service station, I noticed a stranger intently peering at me for no apparent reason. Once past the a newly grown beard, I recognised someone not seen for seventeen years. After the catch-up stuff, he and his wife told me they have box reserved for the accumulating cards, as do others. Confirming the German phrase, 'Papier ist geduldig,' paper is patient. (Has an alternative meaning, paper doesn’t blush.)"

John Krumm: "I've long used greeting card photo paper from Red River. It's good quality and comes with a crease for easy folding. They also have printing templates for Lightroom (and I think Photoshop) that makes for easy printing."

Kristine Hinrichs: "Over the years I’ve made a few $$ selling my photo cards. What has really been fun is printing a card for birthday, wedding, sympathy that I hope will have special meaning to the recipient. About a month into the pandemic lock-down I looked at my substantial card inventory and decided to send a card, with a personal message, to every single person in my contact list for whom I had an address—friends, An old boyfriend, ex-husband, business associates—everyone. In the end I sent 96 cards. I had no expectations. I was overwhelmed by the response, many cards in return. Several said that theirs arrived at a particularly lonely time, a friend’s son sent me a letter on origami paper, several were framed. It was quite an experience."

Jamie Pillers: "Over at the Rangefinder Forum website, there's a bunch of us that do a card exchange roughly once a year (I think we're about to embark on the 12th exchange). There are usually 30 to 40 participants. Everyone picks a favorite photo for their card and sends one to all the other participants. Its great fun then to wait for cards arriving over the next couple of months from all over the world."

Print Crit: Nicolas Vincent

I've received another print that was damaged in transit.

Maybe I'm too conditioned by the ideas I was inculcated with in art school, followed by a fairly lucrative career marketing prints online, but, just so you understand, here's the way I've always thought about it: a print with a flaw is a ruined print. A print is either right or it's a loss.

So some readers might be thinking "so what, it's only one little crimp/crease/tear/bend/blemish, you can look past that no problem," whereas I'm thinking, reject.

Anyway that might account for the fact that I am disconcerted to receive a damaged print in the mail, whereas some senders are quite casual about packing them for shipment. A stern admonition: if a print is damaged in transit, don't blame the Post Office. It was not their fault. It was your fault. (See my post about packing prints for shipment here.) Pack every print like you worked on it. Or like you just sold it for $2,500.

Or, go right on doing whatever you want to—I'm not the boss of you.

Nicolas Vincent, Porto, Portugal, May 2010

With that out of the way, it's time for Nick Vincent's lovely print, which I've been looking at for ten days now and enjoying. Nick lives in Lisbon, Portugal, which means the print had a long journey in which to acquire the two horizontal bend marks you can't see in the above JPEG. They've relaxed a little since the print's been free of the packaging and might press out.

It's a small inkjet print (image area 6.5 x 9.75 inches), mainly midtones and higher with some dark accents—I don't think it contains a pure black, unless it's on the bird's wings, which are probably more like a very dark gray, only near-black. The color is neutral with just the slightest greenishness, but the image color matches the paper base color nicely. The paper has a semi-gloss surface and is luxuriously thick.

I'll be honest—B&W prints made by inkjet usually have a little something extra to prove to me. It's not a very natural medium for B&W. Everybody habitually extols the "control" they say they get with the technology, but baseline—what, shall I call it? The baseline integrity, maybe, across the board—is not the highest and not-quite-successful prints are common in my experience. There might be more control, but there are also more ways to screw up.

One of the major tools we have to work with in B&W is tonal values. Some people are immune to the charms of tones and therefore tend to not "get" B&W. The sensitive deployment of tone is a big part of what I call "judgment" in B&W printing. B&W photographers and printers are exquisitely sensitive to tone. I remember Peter Turnley telling me that when Voja Mitrovic, who was Henri Cartier-Bresson's printer (and Peter's, among many others), would look at prints, he would immediately critique the tones—a little more here, a little less here, his hands vaguely mimicking the motions of dodging and burning. B&W is much more flexible than color, and allows for greater interpretation—plenty of photographers have a tonality that is consistent throughout their work (one of the ways experts detected that Walter Rosenblum was making counterfeit "vintage" prints from Lewis Hine negatives was that the tone of the modern fakes had the unmistakable tonal signature of Walter Rosenblum prints).

Nick's JPEG of his picture. Bear in mind you're looking at a JPEG, not the print.

Nick's judgment here is sure. The print is very sharp, limited it seems by the tooth of the paper (I inspected it with a high-power magnifier), yet nowhere is there any trace of evidence of oversharpening. Keeping a very light touch, he has nevertheless maintained tone in all the highlights—it would have been so easy to step over that line. The highlights in the sky are not as rich as they might have been in a film print, but that works here, because the haze is increasing with distance and that area of the picture should not be calling attention to itself—it conveys only receding distance, the faraway reaches of the river, as well as a certain winsome property of the light, and it's doing its job. (Before you goose up some area of another in a print, ask yourself, do I really want to draw attention to this?) In fact, nothing is overdone in this print.

Two lessons
There are two lessons we might talk about in regard to Nick's print, both of them important. The first is that it's often said that a B&W print must contain a pure white and a pure black. This is false. No argument possible—just false. That's not to say that a print cannot be successful with a maximum black and a paper white; of course it can. It's not to say that your prints cannot all, each and every one, have a pure white and a pure black. Maybe it's your style. But prints can and have succeeded with many, many different ranges of tones. This one has no pure paper white and no pure maximum black, and it would be worse if it did.

As to the notion that a pure black and a pure white are a good starting point, actually most expert printers in the film days believed the opposite—that you start with a deliberately soft (i.e. low contrast) guide print and add contrast until you get to the right value. The reason is that contrast is like volume when listening to recorded music—we tend to prefer louder sounds, and it's harder to turn it down than it is to turn it up (headphone listeners will vouch for this—sometimes to the detriment of their hearing in their later years, unfortunately). Similarly, it's more difficult to dial contrast back down than it is to dial it up, and "overshooting" (by a lot or a little) the just-right contrast level is a common flaw of amateur printmakers.

The other lesson is that this print isn't heavy-handed in any way. I've opined many times that I think that's the most common flaw of all prints from all sources that I see these days: heavy-handedness of some sort. We all tend to get insecure about not enough. Human nature. A guy who gets insecure about sharpening will fret about it and concentrate on it...and oversharpen. A guy who gets insecure about microcontrast will hit the structure or clarity sliders (or whatever it's called in your image editor) too hard. It's the old "if a little is good then a lot must be better" trope in human nature. It's very tiresome. In the little precinct of photo printmaking, it distorts or ruins an awful lot of prints.

Ease = confidence
The size here is unremarkable. Just guessing, size probably isn't critical for this image—I imagine this picture would work at several sizes, although I probably wouldn't want to see it any smaller (and I confess I might like to see it a bit larger). This is the kind of print you'd keep in a box and show along with a bunch of others, and for that purpose it's fine.

Altogether? A confident, sensitive printing job, that speaks well of inkjet. I've continued to enjoy this print, and nothing about it nags at me or reveals itself as a flaw over time. Strong work.

Oh, let me not forget to go to Nick's written description and report the details: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon TS-E 45mm ƒ/2.8 Tilt Shift lens, Epson SureColor P800 (yet again! So far, all our crit prints but one have been made with this printer), and Canson Baryta Photographique (no wonder I liked it—one of my favorite papers for B&W inkjet).

TOP is off tomorrow, so have a very nice, safe, healthy, and productive weekend! Hopefully I'll have a post for Sunday this week if I can tear myself away from my immersion in all the audio stuff. Listening to Hiromi Uehara, Nir Felder, and Marcus Miller among others on Roon right now.

Bless you, and yours.

Mike

Ed. Note: The reason I show rough snapshots of the print being held in my hand or lying on top of the packing material is to make it visually obvious that I have the print here and am looking at the real thing, whereas you, dear reader, are not looking at the real thing. Buyers of our Print Offer prints have been struck by the degree to which actual prints differ from online JPEGs of the same picture. Despite this, my observation has been that people have a tendency to assume they are seeing "enough" in an online JPEG to "know" what the properties of the picture or print are. I'm afraid that is not the case. In any event, this method of illustration for these Print Crit articles is deliberate, and even if you don't agree with my choice, still, it's what I've decided to do. Here I've added Nick's JPEG so you can see the picture better.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP is sustained by many very kind friends through Patreon
and thank you sincerely

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Arthur: "If you were to split this image in half you would have two nicely composed 9x12’s stacked on top of each other. I like it. It gives the picture an expansive look and jiggles the brain. I think the print would have more impact if it were larger. Nice job, Nick.

"FYI—my gecko card was printed on a PRO-100."

Mike replies: Thanks for that last—I made the change.

Here's what Jim is talking about—bottom picture:

Top picture:

It strikes me that this is unusual; not many pictures can be split in half and be two complete compositions. Good observation, Jim.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I like this image, and this print from what I can see (seeing both the snapshot of the actual print, and the photographer's JPEG, is interesting).

"That's probably a crane boom, but whatever it is, it raises the question of where the photo was taken from (alignment is wrong for the photo to be from the crane control cabin). Do you happen to know? Not actually important of course.

"The diagonal of the boom coming in draws the eye in, and it's beautifully parallel to the far river bank. The bird right in the middle is great to stop your eye rather than following the boom on out the other side. And the nearer parts of the city look sharp and immediate, and then aerial perspective kicks in, giving us gradations of distance. This is a really nice photo.

"The 'rule' about full black to full white is like the 'rule' about composition in thirds and all the other 'rules'—a starting point for thinking about things. They're 'rules of thumb,' not real rules. I know, I know, lots of people don't get that. As rules of thumb, I think they're useful—beginners should think about why they are violating them, and not do it for no reason. Experts should pay no attention to rules of thumb; they're for beginners.

"Very often, you want the widest range of tones available, so that you can make details visible in multiple areas of different densities, so if you don't go to the ends of the scale in both directions, you're making a flatter print than you have to and thus making some details less clear than you could. But some images want to be somewhat flat.

"Most of my work, I find, when trying to make 'good' prints, is about suppressing distractions. (Usually, a print that's going to be good has the important stuff fairly good to begin with, not needing huge alteration. Usually.) Mostly by darkening things, but I've resorted to masked blurs and such also. (And cropping comes in, but usually earlier in my head.)"

Charles: "Canson Baryta Photographique—it disappeared about a year ago. Version two emerged a few months ago, and people see differences and argue over whether it is an improvement or a decline."

hugh crawford: "Inkjet doesn’t do a very good impression of silver bromide/gelatin on baryta, but it does a remarkable facsimile of platinum printing. It’s just different. I don’t know what to say about inkjet paper that strives to replicate RC papers other than why? I once pointed out that even the best chef would have trouble making a TV dinner from scratch."

Tom Judd: "Re your comments about packing a print for mailing. You are proposing $50 packing for, in this case, a $5 print. Not practical. The Post Office does have some blame here."

Mike replies: We can disagree here, Tom, and that's okay. But I think it's better and more useful to think of any print as the representative of all the time and all the money you've put into photography over your lifetime—in other words, think of each print as a chunk of what it took you to get to the point of being able to take it and make it. That's why I said it's worthwhile to think about like you just sold it for $2,500. Because, really, what makes a piece of paper with some ink or metalized silver on it worth $2,500 or more? Only that people value it. If you don't value your work, why should you expect others to treat it with respect?

How to Pack Photo Prints for Mailing or Shipping

This might sound a little harsh, for which I apologize in advance. However...

I've noticed a pattern over many years, namely that photographers who ship prints only every so often tend to package them inadequately and then blame the Post Office or the shipper when they arrive damaged. Actually, though, it's not the shipper's fault if prints arrive damaged. It's the sender's fault. (Sorry.)

So as you might have guessed, I've opened another Print Crit print that was damaged in the mail. I suspect we might have a disconnect here. A difference of viewpoint, you might say. Maybe I'm too conditioned by art school followed by a fairly lucrative career marketing prints online, but, you see, to my way of thinking, a print with any flaw is a ruined print. It's either 100% right, or it's a loss. So some readers might be thinking "so what, it's only one little crimp/crease/tear/blemish, let's just look past that"—whereas I'm thinking, reject. That might account for the fact that I am disconcerted to receive a damaged print in the mail, whereas some senders seem to be rather too casual about the fate of their creations in transit.

Obviously, it's possible to package a print so well that damage will not occur except in extremely unusual circumstances. For instance, you could buy a strapped shipping case like this one:

(If Amazon has these, I don't know what they're calling it so I can't search for it. I found this one here. B&H has some, too.)

Unless the shipper just loses it, or drowns it somehow*, it's very likely your print will arrive undamaged. I used to use such cases to ship artwork, simply enclosing return postage and a return mailing label so the recipient could return the empty case to me. Although this might seem improbable, no one ever failed to return my shipping case, and I still have it.

This shipping case survived many back-and-forth trips, and it's also how my most valuable photobook, a pristine original copy of The Decisive Moment, survived three moves unscathed.

This isn't practical when shipping a large number of prints as we do for our print offers. We know from experience that when we ship a large number of prints, a small number will not survive the trip. We can pack them to minimize the possibility of damage, but there are disadvantages to that, namely that the packaging materials will then cost more to buy, and also be heavier, such that the packages are more costly to ship. In that case the trick is to balance the packaging cost and shipping weight well enough so that most of them (say 96–100 out of 100) will arrive undamaged but they'll cost a reasonable amount to pack and ship. If one is lost or arrives with damage, we keep a few extra prints in reserve to send out as replacements.

ABC Box, back in Waukesha, used to make up for me a flat corrugated cardboard box with two fitted sheets of corrugated that went inside it. I put the print between the two sheets of flat corrugated then inserted them in the box. Very nice, but of course it has to be built to a specific size.

How-to
Here's an easy way to pack any small- to medium-sized print for shipping:

1. Get some sheets of plain, flat corrugated cardboard at least two inches larger in each dimension than the size of the print(s) you're shipping. Four to eight inches bigger is better, especially for larger prints. You can sometimes buy these at office supply stores, but for inflated prices; check your area for outlets that supply cardboard boxes of all types. You can usually find plain sheets of corrugated there. Uline calls then "corrugated pads," and sells larger ones in double and triple thicknesses. Other materials can be used, for instance plastic corrugated, chipboard, or foam boards such as Fomecore, but alternatives are usually either heavier or more expensive or both. If you get square ones, you can alternate the orientation of the corrugations for added strength.
2. Get a roll of plain brown Kraft wrapping paper.
3. Sandwich the print with a stack of two to five of the corrugated sheets on one side and the same amount on the other side.
4. Wrap the stack in the Kraft paper as if you were wrapping a birthday present.
5. Address and ship.

There are a few more things to think about: it's wise to cover the face of the print with a sheet or two of plain paper, to protect the print surface or prevent the print paper from picking up any texture. Also, remember that the recipient isn't necessarily going to know where in the stack the print is! So make it easy for them, either by taping or gluing the stack on each side of the print together. Also, do not swaddle the stack in excessive amounts of tape. People preparing shipments have a tendency to entomb the blasted things in yards of tape like it's a time capsule meant for the year 2075, forgetting, apparently, that someone on the other end has to open the darned thing. When I'm Packing Guy, I always keep Unwrapping Guy in mind. You might also want to hold the print centered by making corners out of strips of copier paper and taping the print down using the corners. As an experiment, I once sent a loose print in a stack of corrugated with nothing taped down at all—the print was loose in the stack and the stack was simply loose sheets of cardboard. It was all held together by the Kraft paper wrapping. It arrived fine, with no issues.

What I used to do, though, was to stick three, four, or five sheets of corrugated lightly together with drops of white Elmer's Glue, times two, position the print on top of one stack using just two corners so it couldn't migrate, position the second stack on top, and then, using four pieces of masking tape, one on each straight side, tape the two sides together; then wrap that. I left tabs on the masking tape by folding over one end on itself to provide a convenient handle for tearing the tape off again.

The package protected the print, was easy to open, and the recipient could separate the sheets of corrugated again for reuse (although I never knew if anyone actually did).

Six sheets of, say, 10x12" corrugated, eight sheets of 11x14", or ten sheets of 16x20" or larger corrugated cardboard provide a stout but light package that can be tossed around without hurting the print cossetted safely in the middle.

Suit yourself
Of course, this is just one suggestion; you can pack prints any way you want to. Flat boxes work well too, as long as the print is somehow held away from the sides and (especially) the corners inside the box. But remember...

...If the print doesn't make it, you know whose fault that is.  :-)

Mike

*I once had a mailing tube delivered to me sopping wet.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Help support TOP through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Meeks: "I've been shipping prints in a similar manner for years and use a slightly different method. The major difference is to cut the interior out of one or more sheets of cardboard, just slightly bigger than the work. Place your print or matted work in the void wrapped in a poly bag, sealed and secured with tape so it can't move. I've also used fluted plastic sheets (Coroplast) instead of cardboard. Coroplast is puncture resistant, waterproof and pretty tough. Similar to cardboard, when you cross the direction of the flutes it's even stronger. I'll usually tape the edges and mark where to open the package."

Jimmy Reina: "I'm a pretty handy guy, and in my day, I have hung out with a considerable number of artists. Occasionally, I have been asked to make a custom shipping container, and when asked about shipping insurance, my glib reply was often, 'the best insurance is the container.' I wasn't trying to snag a job, just trying to be realistic. If the shipped object is the result of your labor, what is the real price? It's a little different with prints, but reproducing and reshipping (under pressure) is no picnic."

Print Crit: Three Small Prints

Readers have been submitting prints for critique, and I've gotten a lot of envelopes. I opened three small ones this week, and here's what awaited me...

By Jim Arthur

Well, hello there, little fellow! Jim Arthur of Phoenix, Arizona, sent a nicely prepared print made as a greeting card. The camera was a Canon 6D with EF 40mm ƒ/2.8 lens. The studio lighting for our star, Mr. Gecko, can be seen in the reflection. Jim had more than one chance to photograph him—the first night he appeared, Jim took a picture with his phone, but when the gecko reappeared the second night Jim was ready for him with a bigger camera. He made three appearances in total.

The picture isn't one, but it brings silhouettes to mind, since the sharp outline of the little lizard does all the work, so to speak. Because of the apparent reversal—light against dark—it also brings to mind naturalistic photograms of the sort popular in the 19th century. Jim says this is one of his early attempts at B&W. I think if I were interpreting this I might try it in "cyanotype blue" and see how that worked.

I have only two thoughts. One is that the apparent scratches are a sort of error I'm always careful to look our for...something that's not a mistake but that mimics a mistake. I had a record in the '80s on which one song had a tone that mimicked the sound of a phone. (The way phones sounded then.) It was supposed to be there, but it distracted me from the song because I always thought it was the phone. It happens in writing too—the writer will use a strange literary word or an arcane spelling that brings something entirely different to mind for the reader. It detracts from the flow of communication, in the same way a typo does. Anyway, in the dark area behind the lizard, there are what appear to be scratches. The scratches are on the sliding glass door; but they look like they might be on the print. I think I'd get rid of those just to eliminate the confusion. I once printed a landscape in which some fallen leaves that were perfectly natural to the scene looked just like scraps of litter. I wasn't above removing them to avoid the mis-impression.

Final thought—don't think cards aren't a fine medium for fine prints! I've gotten some beautiful cards over the years, from numerous friends and readers. The single-fold greeting card is a great way to share work and is a nice medium for the photographer-printmaker who wants a convenient and non-threatening way to share real work casually with friends.

By John Gillooly

Next up—a print with an opinion! This is "Leap" by John Gillooly. I liked this when I opened it and I like it now. It's not a "standard" print. It has a rough, high-contrast look reminiscent of a litho-print look. Turns out it was shot in 2001 on an early digital camera, the Nikon D1.

With this print, too, I have only a couple of comments. The first is purely personal...I have a sort of gag response to magenta. Perhaps a color expert might call the color fuchsia. Anyway it's a little too strong for me, like spice level six at a Himalayan restaurant. I suspect the fuchsia color was a bit goosed up, because we see a little too much of it in the girl's legs, too. My guess is that John feels the color is needed and he went a little too much to bat on its behalf, maybe? I'd at least look at it with the color toned down and see what happens. But that's just me. It's not a flaw in the print necessarily. The tonality is somewhat unreal anyway and I suspect many people will say that the strong color against the plain ones of the background is what make the picture work for them. If so, fair enough.

Still, there was something that nagged me all week about this print. There was something about it that didn't seem quite finished, quite whole. I tend to like prints that are "bound" with tone at the edges—I like edge burning—and when paper-white areas in an image are allowed to interface with an edge it can seem like the picture is spilling into its substrate so to speak. It gives a picture an unresolved feel, like an open tuning on a guitar. But that's not really it; there's actually tone everywhere along all four edges. Still, I might try it with a border—something thin but rough, probably—to see how that affects the feel. Not saying that would work, just that it might be instructive to try.

Actually that not-quite-there-yet feeling I get is reflected in the title, too. Is "Leap" maybe just a bit too literal and rote? He writes of the picture, taken at the end of a memorable trip to Cuba, "this has long been among my favorite images from a trip that marked a huge growth point in my path as a photographer—as a person learning to see." A more poetic title with a sense or an oblique implication of that deeper meaning might be worth finding.

And it needs to be bigger, which would feel more in keeping with its boldness. I wonder if John has ever tried to print it at three or four different sizes and pin them on his wall together for six or eight days, somewhere where he will see them often and can really look at them. That's an instructive exercise with the right pictures. When you look at a variety of sizes a lot for days on end, sometimes concentrating, sometimes not, the options "sorts themselves" and the "right" size becomes more clear. I don't believe 5 7/8 x 9" is it. It seemed constrained and sort of "crabbed" at this too-small size.

It's not printing craft per se that needs any work here; it's a fine-tuning of the aesthetic impression, needed to really honor the meaning of the photograph for the photographer. I think this could benefit from some more thought, and further exploration. This might even be a good file to send to another printer to interpret. They would fail, of course, but the exercise sometimes makes us aware of things we might be missing.

John is from Milton Village, Massachusetts, and has written a number of thoughtful and insightful comments here over the years.

By Mark Stracke

Lastly, in a plain envelope with no protection, a small and gentle print from Mark Stracke of the Bronx, New York. The print color is a warmish gray-brown, the paper color (it's Hahnemuhle Bamboo) mildly creamy. At first I thought this was just too unambitious a picture, but it has grown on me as I give it space and give it a chance. I like the way it calls to mind a large-format contact print; the fence is all in focus (thanks for that), and the background is blurred. Look at it quickly and you'll go "meh" and move on; but as I "felt my way into it" over the week or two it's been open I started to feel its specific sense of place, and I found myself imagining that it might be a place where there are memories for the person who took it. Sometimes when you catch yourself looking at a scene the only memory there is something you might be thinking of at that moment or someplace it takes you. What was it Eddie Vedder said of "Black"? "Fragile songs get crushed by the business. I don't want to be a part of it." Fragile pictures too easily get crushed too, or lost. Being quiet is not the same thing as not deserving to be heard.

The only suggestion I could make is that it needs better presentation, to set off its delicate, gem-like feel; but then, maybe it gets it, normally, and Mark just hasn't sent that to me.

I just finished writing this and I should wait till morning before publishing, but it's already a week and a half late fer Pete's sake. I'll post it now and rewrite it tomorrow.

Thanks again to Jim, John, and Mark, and everyone who contributed to the big pile of packages on my porch. No promises, this time, as to when the next Print Crit will be along!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Neil Partridge: "Could we have pictures of the prints laid on a plain background? It's quite distracting seeing your room/hand around them. Also if you feel they'd be better framed or matted could you create a mock-up? Not meaning to create too much extra work, just something simple to focus the eye. Thank you.

Mike replies: No, I'm doing that on purpose. I don't want anyone to forget that I'm looking at a paper print and that it's not what you are privileged to see. Anyone who has bought one of our print offer prints and compared the paper print to the online representation knows that they can be quite different things. In this case I'm not so much interested in showing you the image in its clearest, cleanest form as in discussing something that you can't actually see at all—the print. It's not the way we usually do things here but it's the way I'll be sharing the prints I talk about in the Print Crits.

Print Crit: The 'SPS'

Because last week's print arrived damaged due to inadequate packaging, and I didn't want to discourage myself by confronting that again, for this week I chose a print that came in a box. The box turned out to be oversize, and the print inside wrapped in bubble wrap. Then, there was a crystal-clear fitted sleeve. The print inside was beautifully matted, and the mat had perfect corner cuts. Removing it from the sleeve, I found that the mat was hinged, following "best practices." Lifting the window mat, I saw that the print itself was held in position with transparent corners—again, following archival best practices. It's obviously an inkjet, and appears to be made on a high-quality semi-gloss inkjet paper, some of which are superb.

The print comes to us from photographer/printmaker Christopher J. May, of Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. It shows an old steam locomotive emerging from a cloud of its own steam on a Winter day, with some hints of period-appropriate red brick buildings visible in the background. Under the smokestack is what appears to be a large convex circular mirror, and on the nose of the engine is a gold- or brass-colored circular number plate with the engine number, "346."

There is nothing to criticize here. It's a beautifully made print. The dark areas all have detail, and the clouds of steam are left as bright as possible without losing detail. The sense of modeling in the central feature, the round nose (is that what you'd call it?) of the locomotive, is exquisite, and the bright golden "frame" of the number plate is exceptionally vivid and almost seems to pop out of the picture. (I suspect a fine lens was used—looks it, anyway.) My little illustration snap of it doesn't even come particularly close—the print is finely judged.

In short, an "A" grade in terms of conventional, mainstream printmaking craftsmanship.

'Insight'—or not
At the same time, I've found over this past week that it's not a print that offers me much. (Railfans might beg to differ!) I haven't gone back to look at it for pleasure very often. So I thought I'd climb out on a limb and venture to offer what I call an "insight." An insight is an observation or suggestion that you just throw out there without knowing whether it's correct...just something for the recipient to think about. But it's up to the receiver to decide whether it pertains or not, not the giver. Like throwing spaghetti at the wall then letting the other guy decide whether it sticks. I don't get to say. It's just where my mind went over the course of this week is all.

What came to mind on about my second day with this print was something I have a hazy memory of. I seem to remember a long-ago interview with guitarist Robert Fripp, of King Crimson, who said that his skills were such that he could say anything with his guitar, but that he had learned over the years that he just didn't have a lot to say...in contrast to Jimi Hendrix, who had a whole lot to say. I hope I'm remembering that correctly but I might not be. At any rate, that's the concept—that there are two aspects to most creative, expressive art: what you have to say and the means by which you say it. A vivid example of the tension between these two things is illustrated in the life and art of Vincent Van Gogh; familiarity with Van Gogh's story can help almost any creative soul in any medium. Despite having not been an artist for most of his life, he found he had so much to say that he just had to try. He threw himself into learning to draw and paint. His early efforts were woefully clumsy and frankly pretty awful. But he was so driven, and worked so hard, that eventually his mature style emerged out of the forge-fires of that intense desire to express himself. In so many ways he's the prototype of the modern artist.

Something I've noticed over the years is that photographers who love to concentrate on the "how you say it" half—the skills, craft, materials, and equipment—are sometimes neglecting the other aspect, i.e., the visual content—what they have to say, their distinctive, individualistic way of saying it, and the depth and authenticity of their commitment to that. Any time I come across a picture that looks like it wouldn't be out of place a local art fair with a modest pricetag on it, it has a little higher hurdle to get over to win my admiration. An old steam locomotive telegraphs that it might be an "SPS"—a standard photographic subject—one of a variety of things that any avid shutterbug would come across and think ooh, there's a photo opportunity, better take a picture of that.

It's silly of me to pretend to diagnose this as if it actually has anything to do with Christopher. You can't get a handle on someone's visual interests and passions from one picture. Besides, there are railfans...and photographers who dedicate their lives and work to train pictures. So as I say, it would be up to him to decide if this is useful or not.

However, it's one of the felicities of critique that the person in "the teacher's chair"—the critic—doesn't actually have to be right to be useful. I'll give you an example. When I was acquainting with Beethoven in the '80s, having not grown up with classical music, I conceived a passionate love for Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli's performance of the First Piano Concerto. I was learning a lot about classical music at the time—when I get interested in something I tend to really throw myself at it—and I was devouring Gramophone magazine and The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music written by the same music critics, Ivan March (1928–2018), Edward Greenfield (1928–2015), and Robert Layton. (The 2010 edition was the last.)

Penguin Guide authors Robert Layton, Ivan March, and Edward Greenfield

Anyway, these august tourguides hated Michaelangeli's Beethoven Concerto No. 1. (Courteously, of course.) This shook me in my greenhorn earnestness, such that I had to delve into it—I listened to my Michelangeli record over and over in the following weeks, trying to detect what they objected to, and bought not one but three of the versions that Gramophone and the Penguin Guide approved of, which I could barely afford at the time. (It was like really looking at the sunfish, if you'll recall The Parable of the Sunfish from the other day). I concluded that I really did like Michelangeli's version the best. It spoke to me personally far more than the others. It was the first time I realized that I had to go my own way and not necessarily fall in line with the judgements of even knowledgeable, celebrated critics. I haven't feared to do so since.

Meaning, in this case, that Christopher might engage with my critique but decide that he likes SPS's, and that making superlative prints of standard subjects really is his bag and that he's going to go, pardon the allusion, full steam ahead with it. And that can be very useful too. Disagreeing with a critic can be just as clarifying for any practitioner as agreeing with him or her.

Or, as I say, my insight might just be wrong. But anyway that's what I'd suggest he think about—putting more effort into working on what to say. Because I don't think his printmaking craft needs more work.

The horse's mouth
But let's turn to what he has to say about it, with my comments interspersed. As usual, I only read his comments today, after living with the print for the week.

Title: Welcome Back, #346!

Caption: After seven years of rebuilding, Denver and Rio Grande Consolidation No. 346 rolls out of the roundhouse at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colorado, on December 9th, 2007.

[So it's actually a news photo, in a sense! I didn't see that coming. Maybe not an SPS after all. His details of the event also signifies that his interest in, and knowledge of, historical steam engines might run deeper than I presumed.]

Camera: Pentax K100D

[Pentax...fits nicely with Friday's post.]

Lens: Pentax FA 77mm ƒ/1.8 Limited

[Well that's a relief. At least I was right about something.]

Printer: Epson P800

[That's two weeks in a row—the P800 is batting 1.000 so far in our Print Crit feature.]

Paper: Red River Palo Duro Softgloss Rag

"Over the years," writes Christopher, "I've tweaked the image each time I've printed it. Since it's one that I've printed several times already, it's interesting to see how much better I've gotten with each iteration of it. Post processing tools have gotten better but I think I've also improved, too."

David Vestal wrote entertainingly about the dissonance between the art market's desire for early prints and the fact that most printers get better the longer they print a photograph. For workers—photographers—late prints tend to be better. For the art market, early prints, because they're contemporaneous, are valued more highly. David had typically incisive things to say about it. He was never afraid of lobbing grenades at the follies of the art world.

Christopher does speak of this image a bit dismissively: "This has been one of my most popular prints (well, popular meaning that I've sold more than two copies of it, LOL!)."

Still talking about his printing, he says, "if this makes the cut as one...you review, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it for further things I could improve."

That bolsters my sense that he likes concentrating on the craft and would rather focus on that. So my notion here is that he doesn't need to improve. Not his printing, anyway. He's got the craft angle down. The print and presentation are easily "good enough." Both exude well-honed judgement and skill. What he might think about working on now is a deeper engagement with what he really wants to photograph and how, and to a more robust and confident—particular, idiosyncratic, shall we say—sense of self-expression.

That's where my thoughts went this week, as I mulled over Welcome Back #346!

And if my little arrow misses its mark completely for Christopher, as I've acknowledged it might, then maybe it might do another person reading this some good, as a way to think about their progress from now going forward.

Many thanks to Christopher. It's a pleasure to see such care and attention to detail.

...And now I get to go open next week's, oh boy! A treat for me.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Arthur: "Great post and really nice print. It sounds like this picture was made on a day to remember."

Steve C: "I'm with everybody else, this is great content that anyone with an interest in making pictures can learn from, Mike, and we get exposed to some new work and craft (I didn't even know what hinge mounting was until today) in the process.

"Sometimes we don't even know that we feel strongly about a direction for our work until we get critique that we disagree with. It's a negative kind of positive feedback that we are on the right track, and can clarify your point of departure.

"I've consistently found Ralph Gibson and Joel Meyerowitz to the be two of the most articulate speakers about vision and artistic purpose. Clear, and unapologetic about what they're doing in their own work, and both working masters.

"Gibson openly says he has no story to tell, that he is a formalist, interested primarily in the power of symbols, the way two pictures can speak to one another. That, ultimately, he is interested in how he sees: 'My own perceptual act.'

"If anyone wants to deepen their practice of ideas, Meyrowitz's course at Masters of Photography is worth at least twice the price of admission. As he says in the introduction: 'Photography looks like pictures, but it's really about ideas: and they're your ideas.'

"The thing about ideas, unlike craftsmanship, is that the objective standard for what counts as 'good' is a little more subjective. Ideas tend to resonate strongly with some and not with others.

"I recall reading one landscape photographer describe the challenge, saying it is much easier to make an impressive landscape picture than it is to make one that leaves a lasting impression."

Christopher J May (partial comment): "Your point about it being an SPS does hit home, though. Sometimes I struggle with the fact that much of what I produce can seem like technically sound shots of cliché subjects. I used to spend far more time trackside taking photos. These days, it's not a subject I pursue as much as I once did. Some of this has to do with the fact that I've seen truly inventive work from rail photographers like Frederick Manfred Simon. When I see shots like his, there's a part of me that knows that I don't have the vision to be that creative and unique.

"This goes back to your point about having something to say. In that vein, my work has changed quite a bit since the Welcome Back, #346! image was taken. I'm much more project-oriented these days. The project I've worked the hardest on and the one that I've tried to give my best voice to is my 'Icons of the Plains' project in which I try to photograph grain elevators, especially older wooden elevators, in a way that gives voice to my appreciation for the simple aesthetic beauty of these structures. While I would have I liked to send something from this series, I couldn't pick one. Since the project really works better as a whole, I couldn't settle on just one print for the critique.

"Going back to the SPS discussion, even with the focus that project oriented photography affords, I still struggle with the fact that much of what I produce probably tends toward an aesthetic that matches up with SPS norms. Grain elevator silhouettes at sunset, for instance. The problem lies in the fact that I just like those kinds of photos and like the process of creating them. Because the end goals of my photography are to enjoy the process and to create beautiful prints of that work (for myself, if no one else), I've started trying to let worries about creating cliché shots of 'standard photographic subjects' pass and just focus on making images that meet those goals.

[...]

"Thanks for the thoughtful critique and the kind words about my printing abilities!"

[Ed. Note: You can read the full text of Partial Comments in the Comments Section.]

Trevor Johnson: "Michelangeli, Horowitz and Rubinstein were regarded as the great three pianists around the 1950s and 1960s. I was fortunate, through my piano teacher, to know both Horowitz and Rubinstein. Sadly, the occasion when I was to hear Michelangeli play live, the maestro was ill and the opportunity never arose again. Of the three, Horowitz's star still shines brightly, though the other two have been somewhat forgotten. However, when you hear Pollini play (one of the few pianists alive today I would actually pay to hear live), the influence of Michelangeli is very clear, particularly in Pollini's Beethoven."