I have had a few shows of my work, and afterwards the framed images kind of stack up against the wall around here, but none – the – less, they are the real images to me. I had a show at the (recently closed) Forbes Gallery in NYC about 5 years ago and had a chance to review some of the great images in the Forbes Collection in the back archives of the gallery on 5th Avenue. Many of those were museum quality masterpieces and were stacked up against the wall, laid out on the floor, in the process of organization and review. It was just me and Bonnie Kirschtein, the curator of the gallery. That was an unforgettable experience. To me that was seeing the real shots the way the artists from Ansel Adams to Irving Penn and Andre Kertesz and Henri Cartier-Bresson intended their images to look. I don’t assume to be in a national archive like that but that’s why printing is a standard of completion to me.
Am I wrong? Is there a new standard. Is it flickr and Facebook? Do prints just get stacked up against the wall?
The hallway outside my office. Rack ’em, Stack ’em.
This image printed especially well. Look so smart 24 x 30.
This is one of the few images I printed small to live with at home.
This was a live demonstration shoot during which I retouched the image and made a final print.
Handing out multiple 4×6 albums to your house party guests to view beats all 20 of them huddling around a monitor while you put up a slideshow. 🙂
Dave Hartman
[I forgot to mention that I’d like a new Shelby authorized Cobra Daytona with a 351 and a 5 speed. Maybe a 6 speed if that’s useful at freeway speeds. If I can’t have that I’d like a fully restored 1969 Boss 302 Mustang.]
—
OK, the original question: I think printing is still valid in the digital age. Looking at photos on a smartphone is a sorry experience. As a replacement for a few photos in one’s wallet I guess it’s fine. It’s no replacement for a box of mounted prints or prints on the wall. The new super high resolution LCD monitors like the Apple Retina seem valid to me. The Samsung I’m using now is not a replacement for a print. It’s not high enough resolution for my taste. To put it another way I can see the pixels if I get close or ware glasses.
I’d like to get my Nikon F3 out and shoot a few rolls classic Tri-X a month if there is a film with similar characteristics available today. I have three 4×5″ Linhof(s) and more film SLR Nikon(s) than I care to admit. Digital prepress kill my favorite cut film, Super-XX.
Dave
Zeroneg1:Thanks for the information. Too bad about the cost.Dave
Mr. Speedlight:www.de-vere.com/products.htmYup really too bad since it would be very nice to have!You can always try this:
RedTail_Panther:I commend your regularity. 3 times a week is steady. Are we talking inches or feet?
John Edward:I hear you. Money is a great motivator. I sell prints but I must admit I really just like to hold them in my hands and look at them too. Don’t you like to put prints on your studio wall?
Zeroneg1:Good point. There are still slide projectors. All the digitally transmitted opportunities get our images across the world instantly. But what about for yourself? What do you consider the finished form in it’s highest state? I see your darkroom and I know that you were committed to making quality prints. That magic of seeing an image come up in a tray which captivated many of us still grabs me to a degree when I see a beautiful print slowly roll off the 9880. It may not replace that midnight alchemy of the dark, but it still has a gratifying thrill.Some of the iconic elements of your darkroom make me a bit nostalgic. About 3 years ago I met a woman in a store who was talking about her daughter taking B&W photography in school and looking for darkroom gear. I asked if she had a truck. That day I unloaded everything in my darkroom – enlargers, tanks, trays, timers, jugs, condensers, lenses, even a film dryer, water filters and tongs. Goodbye. All for free just to put that era behind me. Clean fingernails from then on. I’ve never looked back.
Mr. Speedlight:We need to keep buying lottery tickets. Maybe we should organize a NDLC raffle. I’ve been talking about an NDLC road show for 3 years, while we are on the subject of fantasies. Wouldn’t it be fun to get a group together for a NDLC tour bus trip to teach, travel and shoot? If we can only get a few people interested we could go in your Cobra.
Zeroneg1:Oh Thanks for reminding me. I wanted to ask about the option of printing photo books from any of the several sources that seem to make fine reproduction books. There are some terrific options at relatively affordable prices. Do you do these? I see many photographers printing their promotional portfolios this way. Some are really gorgeous. Exciting new possibility and the print quality is remarkably good from small files too. I’ve printed some from small jpegs.
Don Boys:Power to the print. I like what you say. If you take this hobby seriously a good shot is very good for your ego. For me it’s also a matter of hanging it on the wall so I get used to it. So I get tired of it and push myself to move forward into something else. There are always new pages to peel back and if I’m not confronted by my work in a challenging way I get complacent with what I’ve shot. Facing a favorite shot everyday makes me realize what I want to do next. Thanks for joining in the conversation.
JyBravo:What do you mean by short shelf life. I’m sure we’ve all had corrupted files, and hard drives fail. Not often – not as often as fogged film or prints lost to moisture or deterioration. If you back up your files and continue to move archives forward to current media they should last indefinitely. What about the cloud? Do you have faith in off site digital storage where it’s someone else’s responsibility to update the memory and the server? I do – maybe. But I keep most of my images on a series of interchangeable RAID drives. If one goes, I have another and would conceivably rotate out the bad one replacing the damaged one.
I like the idea of books too. They’re a bit more permanent and provide a sense of completeness to a body of work.The issue of permanence is an important one.
Rob Van Petten:If I could use an digital enlarger I would personally go back to making my own prints. I got into the habit of doing Zone System calibration and archival processing for my exposure and development work flow. It was just the inconvenience of film that made me stop doing it and the market have demanded less and less use for it.I actually do premium photo albums but mostly using actual photo print pages (Fuji paper) and not press printed (aka web offset). I personally have not done much of my own personal printing (using inkjet or dye sublimation) since I feel that they are not archival yet but I could be wrong. I know that metallic dyes are now being used as opposed to organic dyes for some printers but I feel that nothing is as stable as silver halide. I am not totally against it because I used to be a Pressman for a Print shop during my college days and see the benefits of a print but the photographer in me wants silver halide for B&W and ilfochrome prints for color images LOL! So yes the highest form of image display for me would be a silver halide print. The Epson 9880 is no longer made though.Digital is not truly archival yet at least it doesn’t have the proven longevity and stability in storage compared to prints,negatives and slides (Kodachrome) since the actual digital storage medium/format keeps changing. Would we still use DVD/Blu-ray or any kind of optical storage in the future? We do not even use CD’s these days much less old floppy disks and such. There is that Sandisk SD archival (WORM card) but would the SD/USB port still exist in the future? We don’t even use Firewire anymore! How often do we backup our RAID server? I thank the cloud computing these days.
However in case of fire, do we actually think about unplugging the RAID storage and running out with it? What if your backup was on optical disks? I would however easily think about the negative/slide binders.
Rob Van Petten:
What about the cloud?
Cloud storage, also known as data center hosting, sounds great and is for many applications, including data storage but… The largest players in cloud hosting (Amazon and Microsoft) are just getting their systems pushed out from B2B clients to consumers. The technology is still new, things are rapidly involving, this is what I do for my day job and am involved with on an enterprise level, and there are still a lot of question marks. Namely for me is again longevity. Look at where we were 20 years ago in terms of photography and digital photography. I remember talking to Navy Journalist mates in 1995 and looking at the Kodak DC40 files they were shooting, they were horrid, pixelated and small files by today’s standards but well suited for Navy needs. When taking a step back and seeing what was going on then compared to what we see and have easily accessible, affordable, etc. today where will it all be in another 20 years? Will Amazon and Microsoft be around in 20 years?
I would love to get prints of everything and keep the raw files or high quality TIFFs and JPGs on some medium for my kids to archive and have access to for printing or whatever is used when they are my age, maybe holograms? Physical prints are the best in my opinion but many printers use economics to dictate their printing supplies and I have seen professional photographers prints fade and dull after just 5 years sitting in a frame out of direct light! I utilize RAID mirrors, USB portable drives, and DVDs with copies of CNX2, VNX2, Gimp, etc. as VM for Windows XP or 7 will allow their use for years to come, at least CD and DVD ROM drives have been around for 15 years+. Its not unlike the dilemmas faced by photography pioneers who had metal plate or glass plate negatives and their transition to emulsion films and its various evolutions. The end result prints are probably the best because if all else fails, you can just use the camera and software of the time and capture an image of the print.
Zeroneg1:I hear your concerns. Maybe you would enjoy and trust the inkjet printers a bit more it you used them with the same dedication as you did your darkroom. I’ve made the move. I have boxes of faded stained halide silver prints here and many that I lost ion 9/11 which were too physically fragile to bother reconstituting on digital media. Nothing is forever except tomorrow and the opportunities that will lead us to better systems. I have many images on CDs that still work. DVDs too. My RAID is 4T of ones I may need to access. That’s manageable. And I have a back-up at home that’s easy to update in case the studio is under attack again. My system is a bit sloppy, but that’s the way my mind works.I’m never nostalgic for the wet darkroom. I like the idea that if my print is ruined, I can run off another one exactly like the first at the touch of a button. All the hard work is done and stored in the file. Maybe I’ve even learned a few new tricks.The Epson 9880 is replaced by the 9890 which is the same printer and ink system with an updated color management system that accommodates the X-rite color calibration to match profiles in various RIP formats – which I have not yet played with. But that Ultra Chrome system has been the standard for almost ten years, which means for me that the evolution of a good working standard has found a plateau and has become more stable. The archival duration is supposed to be 200 years or more. We probably won’t be around to cash in the warrantee if they fade after the first 100, but for right now they look pretty good – better than I could make with a C print or a Dye transfer – and they are repeatable 100% if I need one. I’m not skeptical. You have nothing to lose but the chains of chemistry.
I expect a certain amount of disappointment whenever I see a printed (web) version of my shot. Magazines and books make a lot of compromises to accommodate a number of images on a printed page. Sometimes I get lucky. The books I’ve done for myself I’ve had better luck because there is one shot per page – and the printing of personal photo books has become a popular industry and the process has improved. I would think that you, more than most, would enjoy printing your own stuff.
JyBravo:Photo processes have always been in a state of continuous upgrade. For a long time – 60 or 70 years or so – sheet and roll film silver negatives were a nice stable standard. But even that was evolving slowly. That made us all feel very comfortable about the permanence of negatives, prints and transparencies.
When the digital image capture was developed, we all saw the pixelated early images with skepticism, but knew that progress never goes in reverse. The beginning of something new was steamrolling forward.At the infant stage of digital transformation devices and storage and all of it was evolving rapidly. Manufacturers were competing for the format that would win out as the standard. File size was a driving the technical changes and updates. That rapid turnover of technology and gear, described as Moore’s Law – that everything would become twice as big and half as expensive – has slowed down.Cameras have leveled off at the 24.5 – 36 mg standard for high quality files for a few years. Cameras got good enough. After the D3x at 24mb there was no use in arguing ‘ The pixel race has cooled off. Larger 2 T – 4 T hard drives have also stabilized as storage standards for a while. Among pros and regular private consumer users. I’m surprised some times to visit photographers with 50 – 100 hard drives stored on the premises that contain every shot they’ve ever taken all coded and cataloged. I don’t think all else will ever fail. It hasn’t yet. It just gets updated and so do the photographers. I’m not skeptical but excited about what they will think of next.
TMcEnroe:It’s very interesting to read your reactions to shooting with the AW130. I had a very similar experience with the AW110 2 years ago. The auto functions are liberating to a degree and unnerving at the same time. It forces you to use the variable you can control, the moment, the frame, and the subject. It was even more strange to be throwing the camera into the water shooting above and below the water line without a housing. I was continually making the rational override. I was fortunately in the safety of the backyard pool. I did enjoy the slow-motion video and shooting inside the splashes. www.robvanpetten.com/total-immersion-making-a-big-splash-…
Mr. Speedlight:Bite the bullet. I was planning a live demo shoot while visiting a welder friend where I was picking up a length of chain and some metal odds and ends for props. I happen to notice there was a bucket of stainless spent 45 casings as a door stop. I asked for a handful as props. It was a shiny but already shot stainless 45 caliber, so I added the primer and the bullet in photoshop. It can be silver if that completes the fantasy. It’s a lot safer as a photoshop bullet.
In fact, the first day I rented a D700 to see how it was, before I could even rtfm, I found an interesting dark bar, and later that day a hot rod/custom car show – and was blown away at the sooc prints. The chrome, the finishes, the range in the dark bar….. So my first impression, of what later became my new digital camera, came from the prints. (of course they looked pretty nice on the monitor, too 😉
Zeroneg1:
You can always try this:
I was thinking of a monitor that would replace a 4×5″ negative and be projected onto paper with conventional enlarging lenses like a 135/5.6 and 150/5.6 such as the EL-Nikkors I currently own. I’ve been dreaming about this for a decade anyway.
Dave
Rob Van Petten:
I’m never nostalgic for the wet darkroom.
For commercial photography I wouldn’t think many would be.
I’m one who loved the wet darkroom when printing for myself. When printing for others I liked the money. People designed darkrooms with a dry side and a wet side. I had a dry hand and a wet hand. I didn’t like the rush when a courier would arrive punctually at 6:45 AM.
I haven’t tried an inkjet for a number of years, maybe a decade. I had three Epsons of the same model. I don’t remember the model. It would print up to 13×19″ in sheets. The first two were replaced under warranty. The last was donated to a high school unopened. I paid for the over the counter replacement for the high school. As far as I know the third one was charmed.
Dave
Mr. Speedlight:I was just thinking about the wet side and the dry side. Glad you mentioned that. You may see a huge change in quality, and print longevity over the ink jets of ten years ago. Now the whole darkroom is the dry side and on the light side.
Mr. Speedlight:Yes but the monitor needs to have the proper resolution since it would not look sharp if it only has a 1080P res so you will need it to be a 4K monitor and need to be bright enough to pull it off.
Mr. Speedlight:I still have an LS-1000 and never had problems. It was just harder to use the software after several OS iterations. Of course it would have been nice with ICE. I did only use mine for scanning slide since I use the B&W film in the darkroom. How I wish I have a Cibachrome processor.
