Variations

This week's column by Ctein

One (of many) things I find interesting about printing is that some photographs demand to be printed a certain way and others seem to accommodate a substantial range of different "looks." I have no doubt that this is a function of my artistic mood as much as the photograph. But, still, there are some photographs that I see the need to print in exactly the same way, day after day, if they're going to look right to me. Others, my opinion changes about.

This used to bother me. Eventually I realized that there is no objective arbiter of rightness; it's whatever I think looks good. If a particular photograph looks best to me printed five different ways on five different days, then probably all of those are right for some legitimate value of "right."

Two of the photographs in my recent dye transfer sale illustrate that phenomenon. The "Roses against Black Stone Wall" photograph only looks right if I print it with precisely the right brightnesses; much lighter or darker than that and it's wrong. (Who judges right and wrong? I do; I'm the artist and I'm the only one with standing.) But the hue of that wall can go all over the place. Some days I like it closer to neutral (figure 1); some days I like it very cold (figure 2).

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

(Note: the illustrations are just that, illustrations of differences. There's no point in telling me you like figure 1 better than figure 2; you're looking at lousy JPEGs rendered with lousy publishing software. They don't look anything like the prints, and it's the prints I'm talking about. But I gotta give you something to look at, don't I?)

"Niagara Falls" is a different case. I'm pretty particular about the color balance in this one. Oh, a few CC one way or another from the particular blue-cyan I want looks good, but it can't go very far or the clouds end up appearing to be too cyan-green or too pinkish-white. But, brightness? Yeah, it's a high-key photograph, but which particular high-key I think looks best is all over the map. I'd say there's a good half-stop variation in print density in the way I've printed that photograph over time, and there's a pretty significant difference just from day-to-day. Some days I go in to print it and I think it should be really, really light (figure 3). Other days I think it should be distinctly darker (figure 4). And that's under constant bright incandescent lighting; start messing with that and I suppose anything is possible.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

I used to try to print exactly the same way every day, matching the previous day's prints. Now I just print it however it looks best to me. Yeah, this is lessening of consistency, but who says I was right the previous day...or even more right than I am today? I can't!

It's just one more reason why fine printing is an art and a craft and not a science.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "Years ago, when I first started collecting photography, I decided to buy a print of Ansel Adams' 'Moonrise.' Adams printed several hundred of these, which was good for me, because it kept the prices relatively low for what was already seen as a classic photograph. I then got involved in a protracted discussion with a couple of different gallery people about getting a 'good' version of the print, and wound up buying one that was supplied through the Weston Gallery of Carmel. A 'good' print had to do with the treatment of some very subtle cloud layers against the dark sky, and it seems that even as good a printer as Adams was, some of the cloud results were favored by collectors over others. I've look at a lot of different versions of the images now, besides the one I own, and I can see differences, but they're very, very subtle. Whether he had a particular vision on one day or the next, or if he just had a range of acceptable prints, I don't know...but I do know that some collectors look at these things, and what they think may be different than what Adams thought, and all of that can affect the price of the prints...."

Mike Haspert: "You said,'Yeah, this is lessening of consistency, but who says I was right the previous day...or even more right than I am today? I can't!' Now there's a thought that fills some big shoes. Walt Whitman said, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.' I believe I speak for many when I say. 'Thanks for the free lesson.'"

Comments

[Frank P]

Niagara Falls would probably look better with a mix of the darker center and lighter sky. The cool blue stone on the flower shot reads fake.

[He said...oh, never mind. --Mike]

[Hugh Smith]

Ctein
Artistically, I couldn't agree more. Even Adams and, of course, the masters of art and photography made variations of their work. My prints when made for sale (especially in editions of multiple prints) must all look the same for my clients benefit and digital makes that easy.
But I still find myself going back and making variations and (like you) it's kind of how I feel that day or moment.
That's where in my humble opinion, where photographers like Henri missed out on that pleasure since many did not do their own printing.

[Tim F]

Gven this article it seems like a shame that you're closing your darkroom. It seems likely given the repeatablty of digital printing that you wouldn't 'tweak' so organically?

[ctein]

Dear John,

A couple of decades back, I saw a large retrospective exhibit of Adams at the deYoung Museum. It included a number of “duplicates”, the same photograph but printed several decades apart. Consistently, Adams' later printing of those photographs was much more dramatic, while the earlier printings looked muted and understated, relatively.

If we were talking Photoshop, the best simple description would be that he'd given the Curve a more pronounced S-shape.

This is not to say that collectors would necessarily favor the later prints. Or they might, in this era, and not 50 years from now. Collective tastes change; sometimes the Zeitgeist wants high drama and other times it wants soft-spokenness.

~~~~~~

Dear Frank,

There's no question in my mind that your opinion is entirely worth the paper it's printed on.

Oh, wait...

~~~~~~

Dear Tim,

No, that's entirely wrong. The physical act of dye transfer printing doesn't involve any “organic” tweaking. It's all judgment before and after the fact. I can make large numbers of prints that look perfectly identical to within 1CC. My custom printing is all like that; I presume that what the client says they want is exactly what the client wants, until they tell me differently.

What makes the different dye transfer prints look different is conscious choices to alter the dye bath and rinse chemistries in specific and precise ways. It's an entirely analytic procedure that has no aesthetic or emotive content whatsoever. It's not like throwing a clay pot or carving wood or stone, where there's a kind of body wisdom and brain-body connection that can come into play.

It's just as easy, and common, for me to look at a digital print and say, “Huh, looks too yellow today. I think I'll pull up the yellow curve two points” as to look at a dye transfer print and say, “Huh, looks too yellow today. I think I'll add another 1/2% of .01 sodium hexametaphosphate and 1% of .05 sodium acetate to the yellow rinse bath."

And, even if it were true, variation is just a fact of life. It should not be elevated to a virtue, as it has none. It's just what is.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
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[David H]

I think a discussion based on the repeatability (or not) of digital "impressions" is warranted now.
I find that the more I return to my previous (digital) work - the more I want to inject today's "feelings" into the work.
I realise my taste is maturing and that I want to explore subtlety now.
The big generous dollops of saturation, sharpness, contrast are giving way to actually sensing the whispers that occur in dealing with the imagery in a calmer, quieter and more gentle manner - something I've learnt over the years of reading this blog.
Unfortunately I find it almost universal that my pictorially uneducated clients enjoy the rather abrupt 110% imagery. It takes a lot for people to acknowledge, even the existence of, calm work.

[Jeff]

Regarding John Camp's comments on Moonrise, Adams' variations were far more than subtle. He dramatically altered, over a 34-year period, the sky rendition. The following article, which I've linked here before, shows the changes in contrast and drama over that time...

http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/anseladams/arrington/arrington_adams.html

[He also (taking a calculated risk of possible damage or ruination) intensified the lower part of the negative at some point during its history. That would be approximately the equivalent of boosting the "Clarity" slider for the land area in the picture. --Mike]

[Bahi]

I've been doing a ton of printing recently and have been worried by the same thing: I come back to a carefully processed, soft-proofed photograph that I've printed already and have been delighted with (tone, colour, relationship between elements, sharpness) and find myself thinking that I'd been wrong about the picture all along. Kills me. Anyway, I feel better now so thanks. :-)

[YS]

I have to say, I like both 3 and 4. Hard choices indeed.

[Bernd Reinhardt]

I guess I was born with a good dose of OCD and I obviously shoot RAW, but as a result I agonize over minute differences in rendition of an image, and I seem to be unable to throw out any detail in a photograph. It takes me forever when I print something for an exhibition and in the end I sometimes wonder if any of it even matters.

I have lately started shooting black and white film again, and I am thinking of shooting some slides while the film is still around; simply because the thought of not having to worry about how to interpret color in post processing seem very liberating.

[Geoff Wittig]

When I first started printing my own photographs back at the dawn of the digital era, I did my best to match the color balance and apparent contrast of the slide film. Only slowly did I recognize how pointless that attempt was. Slide film has its own perceptual biases; attempting to mimic them with a digital print is only one aesthetic choice among many, and generally not the best from an artistic standpoint.
The infinite variability of digital processing and printing eventually encouraged me to make more conscious choices about the tonal range, contrast, color balance and saturation rather than accepting the brain-dead defaults. I'm much happier with prints I've made in the past couple of years than those twelve years back, some of which now make me cringe to look at.

Recently I've learned more about digital printing from taking up oil painting. Starting with a blank canvas, a painting requires you to make very explicit choices about every aspect of the picture. This has encouraged me to go back to my photographic printing with a more open mind about what I'm trying to achieve with an interpretive print. I no longer let the background hills in a misty dawn landscape photo fall wherever they will by default; I decide consciously where I want them in terms of contrast and color balance to reinforce their place in space. Learning the technical details of Photoshop and the inkjet printing process is necessary, but not sufficient. The aesthetic goal eventually has to drive the process.
Thanks to Ctein for providing us a window into some of his aesthetic process.

[Dave Van de Mark]

Even though I probably made my last "hand made, real darkroom B&W print" over 30 years ago, I still remember that merely the freshness of the chemistry, or how I agitated it in the developer, or rubbed some part a different way or the amount of time I did it, it would create unique variations from previous print. It became difficult trying to remember exactly what I did to create the version I liked the most! And sometimes I never could...

[ctein]

Dear Mike,

Whitman is one of my favorite poets, and that is my favorite quote from his writings. I invoke it frequently; it fits me to a T.

~~~~

Dear Geoff,

It's hard to estimate the impact of a medium's “perceptual biases” (I like that phrase) until you have something to compare it to. Dye transfer is a fairly high-fidelity process; it certainly makes clear the perceptual biases in, say, chromogenic prints. But it was only when I started getting scans of my negatives, back in the nineties, that I discovered just how much all silver halide-based printing processes were imposing huge biases on what my prints looked like. Scanning tends to be a much more “linear” process, and I found that some of my negatives look radically different scanned than printed in a darkroom, no matter how I printed them.

Usually the scan's "biases" were superior, but on occasions it just looked wrong. Crepuscular Rays ( http://ctein.com/clearlak.htm ), which was part of last year's inkjet sale, turned out to be phenomenally difficult to print. A linear scan didn't look anything like my dye transfer print… or what I remembered the scene to look like. It may have accurately represented what the film saw, but that wasn't what my eye had seen, and I wanted to be printing what my eye had seen. It was a major undertaking to get an inkjet print that looked the way I wanted.

In other cases, more commonly, I'll look at the scan and go, “Oh wow, I never thought of taking it in that direction… I LIKE it!”

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Aesthetic judgement and restraint are top-level topics worth noting in the stream of this general post-capture/delivery subject. Excessive processing is a stark hallmark of amateur photography today.