DevilN Details

Since coming back from our vacation last month life has kept me pretty busy. Work is just as hectic as ever, and there are always many things to occupy my time on the weekends. The kids have music and Soccer, and I’m actually doing a pretty good job of getting back into shape. In additon to my weekend bicycle rides I’m now waking up at 5:00am twice a week to ride my bike to work and back. So that leaves even less time and energy to devote to photography and this blog in the evenings. I suppose that as a result of the overload from vacation and work and life I just haven’t felt very creative lately. I haven’t shot much, and I’ve only printed things that I had to, so there just hasn’t been much to say.

I’ve been participating in a print exchange group with several other people for the past few months. This group only trades digitally printed blackand white images. Its pretty fun and quite interesting to see not only what other people are photographing, but also all the different ways that we are capturing, processing and printing our images. I’ve been using the Epson 1400 printer along with the Piezography Special Edition K6 inks for the exchanges for 3 months now. The prints that this system makes really are beautifully warm. I’ve grown to like them quite a lot. But the Epson 1400 printer itself has been a royal pain to use. I’m currently on my second one, and a replacement for that one is supposed to be on its way from Epson. The paper feed mechanism in this printer is just rubbish. I really wish that I had waited for Jon Cone to develop the special edition ink set for another printer. He has recently announced a special edition K7 inkset for the Epson 1900, and I expect that printer will perform much better than the 1400. Unfortunately I already have a sum of a few hundred dollars invested in the 1400 and moving to the 1900 won’t be cheap. So I’m left hoping that I’ll get lucky with this next replacement from Epson and my problems will be solved. If so I’ll be sure to post it here.

Another bit of photography related news is that I’m once again participating in an Aline Smithson workshop at Julia Dean’s. These classes are always fun and eye opening. Its a great way to meet other photographers who are in a place similar to my own (but everyone else seems to be a little further ahead in getting their stuff shown). Aline is always sending us information on photo competitions, new shows, portfolio review opportunities etc. I’d really like to get that portfolio I mentioned at the beginnig of this blog printed so I could actually have something to bring to a review, but that just hasn’t been happening for me lately. 

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Well I’ve been on a pretty cool european vacation for the past few weeks. I’ve been back in the states for a week now, but it has been difficult to make the time to update this blog due to jet lag and all the things that life requires when gone from home for 3 weeks. I had hoped that I would have better internet access while I was away but that didn’t really happen. So I’ve got a lot of catching up to do here on DevliN Details.

I guess the first order of business is to give a quick rundown of where I’ve been. We started out by flying from L.A. to Milan Italy, and then taking a train to visit old friends in Padua. Our time there was just wonderful, friends were great, food was great, wine was great, and I even did a decent job of picking up on Italian. Next was on to Venice to visit with one of my old college friends and her 3 children. I hadn’t seen here in over 10 years so that was very nice and venice was just as beautiful as you might expect. There was lots of time spent seeing the sights and travelling around on water buses. St. Mark’s Square and the palace of the Doge’s was a site to behold. Next was another train ride to Rome where we caught up with my sisters and their families for 3 days of heat, walking and lots of Roman touristy kinda places to see. We managed to hit all the big ones, but it was all kind of a rush because we had our days crammed with places to go see, shop and eat at. The most impressive thing wasn’t the colloseum, it was indeed the Cistine chapel. It is truly as great as its cracked up to be. After Italy we went on a 10 day eastern Mediterranian cruise, hitting up Dubrovnik, Katakolon, Corfu, Santorini, Valetta and Messina. After all of that we decided to wind things down by flying to Berlin to stay with my brother in-law for 3 nights.

Needless to say we were all thoroughly exhausted by the time we got home. Each day consisted of miles of walking, way too much shopping, and pretty stiff heat (until Berlin). I shot roughly 1700 images (though there was a lot of bracketing going on due to only being out in the middle of the day), I’ve only begun to look at a few of them so far. It will be a pretty big effort for me to get them slimmed down to something manageable for a person to view on the web. Unfortunately I didn’t really get to do much shooting for fine artwork due to the limitations of time from the cruise, and also unfortunately to being sick for about a week on the boat. I totally missed going ashore at Katakolon due to feeling poorly. My time in Santorini was also hampered by my sick stomach.

Photography wise it was difficult shooting only in the middle of the day. The sun was high and bright, the skies were usually cloudless and missing that lovely dark blue we get later in the day. One thing that I did feel good about was the performance of my Nikon D300. The camera really is quite awsome, I was most impressed with the layout of the controls on the body and how I was able to manipulate so many of them without even having to remove my eye from the viewfinder. Turning on and off bracketing, continuous shooting modes, AF sensor selection, ISO, exposure compensation all worked really well. And I was making changes to those settings all the time. I also was really impressed with my first extensive uses of the 17-55 and 14-24 lenses. I rarely ever shot with anything else on this trip.

However using such wide angle lenses presents a higher degree of difficulty in coming up with interesting compositions. I made some progress in this regard, but there are still lots of photos where I just wasn’t able to pull it all together into something more interesting than a snapshot. I also did some experimentation with bracketing and using my SB-800 for fill flash. After reviewing the first few days of shooting on my laptop, it was really apparent to me that I was going to have a tough time making nice pictures with all the  blown highlights and blocked shadows because a camera just doesn’t have any where near the dynamic range of the human eye. Taking 3 photos with bracketing +0 EV, -1EV and +1EV makes for a lot of work later on in post processing. On top of that I wasn’t able to bring a tripod due to weight issues so I’ll have to line up many of the images in PS and try to figure out a way to get the highs lows and mids in the range that I want. I expect that I’ll spend a lot of time learning even more about masking in the next few weeks. As such I put in an order for Katrin Eismann’s Photoshop Masking and Compositing so I can really do my best to merge the 3 exposures into something I find pleasing.

On a final note, while I was gone on vacation an old photo of mine kept gaining greater interest over at Jpeg magazine. The image at the top of this post was shot in Puerto Vallarta in 2004 and has been up at jpgmag.com for at least 18 months or so. I guess it has slowly gained popularity because every once in a while I’d get an email from them about how it was favorited by one of their users. Now it is officially a “Hot Photo”. I haven’t posted any images at Jpeg ever since that first day, I guess I should do a better job of trying to get my images out there for others to see. Its funny, I’ve always liked that photo and can see the interest in it because of the colors, but it never was one that I considered to be one of my best, or all that unique. Of couse most of those remain in boxes, or on my walls, or hidden on some hard drive where no one else can see them.

There just isn’t enough time to make everything happen!

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Well I’ve had this new printing system for a while now and have learned quite a few things about it. And for that matter I suppose at least a couple of new things about me too. As I originally expected nothing is ever as easy as it seems at first blush. There are certainly aspects of printing with this new printer that drive me crazy. I’ve been using higher end Epson printers for over 5 years now and going back to something that is built to a $300.00 price point brings along with it a few frustrations. The biggest two have to be the fact that the ink cartridges are so small, and that the printer doesn’t have and adjustable paper thickness settings and that can result in frequent print head strikes against the paper.  Due to the small size (11 ml I think) of the cartridges, I’ve been having to refill one or two carts every day or so. This is really annoying to me. I’ve been printing with the Epson 3800 for over a year now and have become used to the large 80ml ink carts, that usually only require replacing 1 every month or so. If I wind up dedicating this printer to B/W printing with the Piezography inks then I will have to plunk down the money for the continuous ink system (CIS) just so I’m not spending a little bit of time refilling cartridges every day. Right now it seems like that is a distinct possibility for me since I can get my hands on an old Epson 2200 printer that my wife and kids can use for making color prints. I checked online at my favorite Epson supply store (atlex.com) and the 2200 carts sell for only about $8.90 each while the Epson color carts for the 1400 are about $16.00!

Once I got a few things explained to me multiple times by Jon Cone I was able to make some pretty nice prints with this new system. However, frequently when I first pull a print off of the printer I’m a little bit disappointed in the look, sometimes its too flat, or too red/brown, or just not right in some way. But then, I wait a few hours and the inks begin to stabilize and work more in concert with one another and the paper, then the prints begin to grow on me. And usually by the next day I’m thinking, man this image looks pretty darned good now. I didn’t really get around to printing the same file with the new inks and comparing them to a print made with my 3800 and the ABW mode until tonight.  I took the image that will be the third in the triptych that I’ve mentioned before and printed it with both systems on the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 paper. By printing the same file (which was optimized for Piezography) I could immediatly see that the ABW print was simply outclassed. The ABW print was much darker in the lower tones, and looses some detail due to blocking. Additionally, the mid and upper tones of the ABW print just lacked the spark that I see in the Piezography print. This may be the result of the subtle split tone that you get out of the Piezography print.

At some point in the next few days I’ll have to tweak that file for ABW printing and redo this comparison to make it a little more fair. I suspect that the Piezography print had a real advantage here in that I was able to use the provided ICC profiles for softproofing, and all of my fine tuning edits were made with that in mind. This is one area where printing with Piezography really does have a leg up on the ABW system. The only way to get softproofs with ABW is through the somewhat laborious QTR Create ICC program. I had tried it before a year or two ago and wasn’t that thrilled with the results. The ICC profiles that Cone provides are actually pretty darned accurate….zzzzzz I’m dozing at the keyboard again.

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I’ve gone through ups and downs while evaluating this new inkset. At firt I thought it was really cool, then I realized it was just coincidental color still in my system. Then I thought it wasn’t all too different from the images that I can make with the ABW mode on my 3800. Next I was feeling really unsure about the look of the darker tones in the piezography images (the reddish warmth was quite different than what I was used to and struck me as rather odd). But now for the past couple of days it has started to grow on me once again, kinda like an acquired taste. Over the past few days I’ve been combing through some of my favorite b/w images and printing them with the new inks. I’ve already had to refill one of the cartridges and I’ve only been using the system for one week now. Tonight I came across this image that I took at the Guggenheim Museum back in 2005.

I really enjoyed the time I had at the Guggenheim that day, they just happened to have an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s on display when I was there. I knew that Mapplethorpe had caused quite some controversy while he was alive, but didn’t really know too much about it. Well I can certainly see why a bunch of stuffy old conservatives would get all bent out of shape by some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. While I was able to get by some of the more difficult to appreciate homoerotic images, I was at the same time blown away by the beauty in so many of those prints. It didn’t really matter if they were of flowers, a statue or a person there was just so much artistic verisimilitude in his work that I found inspiring. I recall seeing for the first time a modern highly techincal large format platinum print. Having become used to the near perfection of Ansel Adams style of printing with deep blacks (think later versions of Hernandez) and rather strong contrasts, it was rather astonishing to see soft warm radiance in those Mapplethorpe prints. At the time it also reinforced in my mind that not all photographic worth should be tied up in trying to approximate the air dried fiber based glossy look. Producing an image with our modern inkjets with the reduced dmax and acuity of the best fine art matte papers produces a result than can at times be not unlike what I saw that day at the Guggenheim.

The new inks that I’ve been working with have a distinct look, they ought to provide me with the chance to produce some of my own soft, warm, radiant prints.

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I’ve been printing pretty much at every free moment that I have at home. Using these new inks is quite interesting, but not a slam dunk for me. Normally I won’t be posting photos of my family on this blog, but I’ve been staring at many prints of this image all day long and I figure it will come up in my comments.

After that first night of printing with the Piezography inks in my 1400 my hopes were pretty high and I was excited about all the changes that I was seeing in the ink colors throughout the image. By the middle of the day it started to dawn on me that something wasn’t quite right with the colors that I was seeeing. They were just too colorful to have come out of the bottles of gray muck that I had poured into the ink cartridges before beginning this whole process. After thinking about this a little harder my mind began to gain some traction on what was happening here. Putting 2 and 2 together I finally realized that it was the earlier prints that were more colorful while in the later ones the warmth around the sun that looked so amazing was settling down to a more expected shade of gray. As I continued to use the system the last bits of color were finally being removed from the ink lines and heads, and I was beginning to see the true color of what the Piezography Special K6 inkset looks like on the Epson 1400. It was much different than I had expected.

The split toned nature of the images produced by this system are rather subtle, and I don’t really see much neutral in the images at all. The sepia ink is pretty strong in this combination and as the image gets darker it takes on a rather ruddy hue in the shadow areas. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to accurately describe what I see when using this new inkset and have a few ideas. However this initial effort to blog about what I’m doing and seeing won’t be perfect. Objectively describing what these prints look like will be difficult and I suspect not very satisfying for the reader. When I see a slew of Lab values describing a step wedge it doesn’t translate at all into a visual representation of luminance and color in my head. Yet at this point I can think of no other way to objectively state the subtle changes in color that these inks present on the page.

This ink system really does look best on the high quality matte papers like Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, German Etching and Epson Velvet Fine Art. But these papers are all quite expensive (each sheet costs more than $1.00). I’ve burned through a lot of expensive paper in the past week fooling around with this system. So one of my first goals was to figure out what inexpensive paper would work best for me. I do lots of testing and proof prints in my normal approach to working up an image. So its pretty important for me to have a paper that I know well and that costs a reasonable amount of money. Most people default to Epson Enhanced Matte (EEM) for this duty because it offers a good dmax (with Ultrachrome K3 inks) and is very reasonably priced. However, for myself I’ve never liked how shadows and black areas work with EEM and UC K3. This combination gives a mottled appearance of over inking in the shadow areas. I have tons of this paper that’s just been sitting around my house for the past 2 or 3 years (ever since I got a 2400 and the UC K3 inks came out).

With the arrival of the Piezography inks I had high hopes for being able to make use of all the EEM that I have here. Well after the first two prints I gave up on EEM with Piezography. This paper offers the weakest dmax with the piezography inks (which is the exact opposite of UC K3). Not only that, but the mottling in the shadow areas was still there! So it was in fact a double whammy of no and HELL no to using EEM with this new system.

Thanks to a suggestion from another B/W ink genius I found out about Premier Art Matte BW 210 (PBW). This paper is available from MIS at www.inksupply.com and also from Atlex.com. It is a much more affordable $0.22/sheet and doesn’t suffer from the same poor shadow performance as EEM. I’ve been using this paper somewhat successfully over the past two years with my 3800. The Piezography system didn’t come with QTR curves for this paper, or with icc profiles that would allow a soft proof preview. My first couple of prints on this paper with the new inks weren’t so hot. So this weekend I set out to systematically figure out what to do about an inexpensive proofing paper. I looked at EEM, PBW, Premier Art Hot Press 205 (not really that cheap) and started printing the image at the top of this post with many of the various QTR curves that are made for the 1400 and Piezography K6 inks. Eventually I found a curve file that works well with PBW. Using the curve for H. Photo Rag Bright White gave a decent image on PBW. Still not really as good as the more expensive papers, but close enough. PBW has kind of a lot of OBAs so the paper white is more blueish in color than EEM. I haven’t yet measured the dmax with the K6 inkset on PBW, but will get to that tomorrow after my step wedge has had a night to dry and settle down.

Woah, it late, already after 11:00. I’ll have more to say in my next post.

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Well life has been very full for me in the past few weeks. I’m working like crazy at my regular job, early mornings, and even working on the weekend. Its not so bad though, because I’m doing stuff that is challenging and kinda fun. At the same time though some of it is pretty hard and requires tons of abstract thought and the type of problem solving required to integrate many conceptual components that only exist in my head (such is the life of a software designer). On top of all the work that pays the bills I’ve also been pretty wrapped up in exercising some of the new photo gear that I’ve received over the past couple of weeks.

Firstly I got a new lens (I’ve convinced myself that I needed to evaluate it). The Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 wide angle zoom lens is the newest and quite possibly the best wide angle lens available short of the legendary 21mm Zeiss  Distagon. The lens is rather large and heavy, and the front lens element is huge and bulbous. But it does take some pretty darned nice photos. I don’t have anything particularly worthwhile to show from it yet because I just haven’t been able to shoot without outside of my driveway, or in the house in the evenings. My initial batch of comparisons against my Nikon 12-24 f/4 show that the new 14-24 is very impressive in the corners (the weakest spot of the 12-24). In all likelihood I’ll wind up keeping this lens, even though it is so expensive and not quite as wide as the 12-24. The photo that I’ve included with this post is one of the few photos I’ve shot at 12mm that I would consider successful. At the time I was on a moving ship, so that along with the subject matter rendered the somewhat weak corners moot.

Part of the reason why I haven’t had as much time to shoot with the new lens is that I also have been experimenting with a new printing system and new papers. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I got a new Epson 1400 printer. This is a color inkjet printer that uses Epson dyes. However, a couple of the black and white inkjet gurus like Jon Cone and Paul Roark have discovered that this printer really excels at b/w when using dedicated monochrome pigmented inks. Now I’ve been hearing about how wonderful Cone’s piezography system has been for years and have really wanted to get a chance to try this out for myself. The combination of the economically priced 1400 and the great things I was hearing about piezography inks using this printer finally convinced me to take the plunge and purchase the Piezography Special Edition K6 inkset for the 1400.

The new inks arrived on Monday along with two sample packs of Cone Studio Type 1 and Type 2 papers. Normally the Piezography system for the 1400 is only available as a CIS system. I didn’t really want to use a CIS system because my wife and kids will also need to be able to swap out the b/w ink cartridges and replace them with the color ones. Luckily MIS sells a set of refillable ink cartridges for the 1400 (for how much longer I’m not sure though). This brought the cost of going to a dedicated monochrome inks to be just about $400. This is pretty steep considering that the printer itself only cost about $200. Prices for everything are just ridiculous nowadays. Yesterday I went to order 2 special pens for writing on CDs. The cost of the pens was $8, the cost to ship them to me was $9.00. I canceled the order so Icould wait ’till I was ready to order something else so I could combine shipping costs.

Filling the carts with the Piezography inks was fairly straightforward. Though I had some trouble with using the backfill adapter to suck out 1cc of ink inorder to remove air bubbles from the cartridge. I was a little worried that there might be problems with the chips on these refillable cartridges since they were all third party items. But everything worked perfectly well after installing the new carts (we’ll have to see if things go so smoothly when it becomes time to refill the carts). I ran 2 cleaning cycles on the 1400 waiting to get all nozzles firing without any gaps. This proved to be more difficult than I expected because the number 1 piezography ink is so light that its darned near impossible to see. So I ran  fourth cleaning cycle and then made my first piezography print of the image at the top of this post. It came out kinda flat and with some funny coloring to the image. Well I had made the first of many mistakes in learning about printing with these new inks. The first mistake I made was trying to save a little bit of ink and time by printing at 1440 dpi. Normally with the Epson Ultrachrome inks there is not too much difference between 1440 and 2880 dpi. Not so with these inks on the 1400, according to Jon Cone the printing curve description files were made specifically with the 2880 dpi resolution as the intended target.

My next print was done at 2880 and came out looking tons better! There was a decent amount of black in the image now, and the mid tone contrast was dramatically improved, along with highlight separation. Also at this point I could see that there was a very interesting color shift in the upper mids to highs around the sun and gradually radiating through the left third of the image. I thought that this was an amazing split with warmth in the mid to upper regions and gradually going through a neutral/cooling descent into black. This wasn’t really how the inks were supposed to perform. What I was seeing was just a very lucky coincidence of the remaining yellow ink that was still in the printer, and seemed to really only show up in the areas that looked incredibly interesting around the lighter areas of the photo. That first night I probably printed at least 8 different versions of this image on several different papers and was amazed about how much the colors changed as I chaged each paper. While Piezography normally does go through subtle hue changes with different papers, that was not was not what I was seeing. I was still seeing the final remnants of the color inks that were originally in the printer.

To be continued….

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Man I can’t believe that the Lakers so totally blew it tonight, I’m bummed and am afraid that they are TOAST!

Now back to the topic at hand. Scaling this image (the one in my post on June 1st) turned out to be a good test for a re-evaluation of several scaling techniques. This time though I only did a 3 way comparison:

1. Digital Outback Photo’s (DOP) upsizing plugin
2. Photoshop’s bicubic smoother
3. Qimage

For this test I scaled my image up to 24×36″ (which is quite a bit larger than I can actually print).  There was very little difference between bicubic and the DOP plugin. They both looked ok, with no noticeable jaggies or objectionable artifacts. However, the output from Qimage did actually look better, it was sharper, a little better defined, and offered more contrast. I suspect that it was a combination of Qimage’s scaling and sharpening algorithms that made the difference. I haven’t gone ahead and purchased Qimage yet, but I’m thinking that I probably will now that I can actually see that it is doing better than the other techniques I’ve been using. What’s kinda holding me back from just buying it straight away is that I don’t particularly care for its interface. Every time that I go to use this program I find myself struggling with simple things like rotating the image or deciding on which scaling algorithm to use. To me the UI is confusing and difficult to use. I also am not so thrilled about having to go to another program outside of Photoshop to get my image printed. If and when I get around to buying the program I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it here at my DevilN Details blog.

I finally made  a successful print of my second portfolio image using Qimage on Tuesday. Everything worked out well and I didn’t find any problems in this second print. Next up will be the third portfolio image which you can see in the middle of my post on May 3rd. I’m hoping that once the three of these prints are finished that they will look well in a tryptich arrangement.

Finally, on another note I ordered a new lens yesterday, the Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 which is supposed to be the most awesome wide angle lens currently made. I’ll be doing some tests and comparing it to my 12-24 f/4 to see if it is worth the $600 premium. I also am expecting my first set of piezography inks to arrive next week. I might have a thing or two to say about them after I’ve had a chance to work with these new toys for a while.

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Yesterday I finished print number two, which was a long time in coming. I actually made what I thought was the final version of print number two about a week ago. But after letting it sit out to dry for a day I looked at the image closely before I boxed it up. On close inspection I could see some digital artifacts in some of the rock detail that just weren’t visible to me in the smaller prints. These image flaws made some of the very abstract detail in the rocks look harsh and brittle (very digital-ly looking, now there’s a word for you). I didn’t like this at all and felt that this was something that I wouldn’t really be happy giving to someone else, so I went back to the computer to see what went wrong.

It turns out that the problem was twofold. While working on the image in Photoshop I tend to go no larger than 50% magnification (unless something requires very small scale editing). I had applied at least 2 rounds of sharpening to the image as I worked on it. This alone wasn’t a problem, as the image looked fine as 6×10″ and I’m pretty sure it still would have been fine up to 11×17″. The images for this portfolio are being scaled up to 14×21″ and on top of that the scaling algorithm that I was using does another final round of output sharpening as part of this enlargement process. It was this final round of sharpening after scaling the image up that did this print in.

Digitally enlarging an image is a pretty interesting process that can be done in any number of ways. Choosing the best way to scale an image has become a good deal easier in recent years. Back in the “old days” pre 2004 we used either Photoshop’s bicubic method or spent some money and purchased a program like Genuine Fractals (GF), which was a very popular program for doing these kinds of things. Before Photoshop CS/CS2, Genuine Fractals was noticeably better than Photoshop’s bicubic method. PS CS3’s bicubic smoother and sharper scaling algorithms are much better nowadays especially for things that are likely only going to be scaled from a 10+ megapixel camera up to a 17×22″ print size. There are also tools like AlienSkin Blow Up, and Qimage. A couple of years ago I looked closely at all of these products (and several techniques for scaling using Photoshop tools) and was never really able to produce demonstrably better enlargements (of my images, to my desired size) with these other programs than I could with what was already in Photoshop. So I just stuck with Photoshop’s bicubic smoother, or the upsizing routine from the folks at Digital Outback Photo.

I think that in my case, I just didn’t have a need to up rez my photos to the point that these more expensive (and hopefully more advanced) scaling algorithms had a chance to show their stuff. In this particular instance it was the Digital Outback Photo upsizing method that caused print number two to be botched. I’m pretty sure that had it not applied that final bit of sharpening the image would have looked ok. With that discovery I resized the image simply using Photoshop’s bicubic smoother and it looked fine, no longer harsh and brittle. I also decided that I’d take another look at Qimage now that I had an image that was actually kinda difficult to scale to the size that I wanted.

Qimage is a program that has a very avid following out there in the inkjet printer community. Qimage not only provides several advanced scaling algorithms, but also employs its own “intelligent” form of output sharpening, and also a page layout facility (which automates the most efficient placement of multiple images on a single page). Oh I forgot to mention that Qimage is also a fully color managed image viewer and print spooler too! Over the years I’ve wondered what it is about this program that causes so many of its users to scream its virtues at the top of their lungs, where I couldn’t see any real improvement over the scaling that I performed in Photoshop.

Its getting late and I’m pretty tired, so I’ll have to continue this post tomorrow…zzzz

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I wonder if this feeling of self doubt is common to those who are trying to put something together like I am with this portfolio. Frequently when I get back from a shoot, I download my images and run through them quickly. As I am shooting I take note of the ones that I think are going to be especially interesting look at them first when reviewing the shots on the computer for the first time. Sometimes I’m right about what was a good capture and other times I’m pretty wrong. There are other images that take quite some time to grow on me, for me to notice something especially interesting about them, or for the potential of the image to be worked into something more than the shapes and light that were present when I tripped the shutter.

The very nature of many of the images that I’ve selected for this portfolio are such that I only had some general idea of what they would look like as I opened the shutter for any where from 0.75 to 5 seconds while the waves were crashing over the rocks. The three photos that will make up the triptych I am working on are examples of this delayed type of realization. It was only after spending a fair amount of time reviewing those images that I had shot several months prior to beginning this portfolio project when it dawned on me that some of the many photos of this rock formation could possibly fit together forming a single piece. I most always have a tendency to tackle the toughest problems first when working, so I’ve put of the photos I am more sure about until later in the project.

With the first photo printed I began editing the second image today (it is at the top of this post). In the preceding months I had already done some quick (maybe an hour total over the 5 months since I first shot it) and dirty tweaks of the image just to get myself an idea of what it might look like in final form. Trying to bring it into final form can be a fairly slow process for me. Today alone I’ve probably spent about 5 hours working on this photo. This involves doing a fresh conversion from the RAW color photo. Then doing a second conversion from color into black and white, followed by the tweaking of luminance curves, dodging and burning the rocks and clouds, and making around 10 test prints today. I don’t really know if I’m pitifully slow when working on an image, but there are so many things to consider: how much contrast is needed, where to set the black point, is there enough shadow/highlight detail? I spend a lot of time considering so many aspects of each photo, and then when I begin to make the print there is still even more time that goes into things like ink tone and paper choice. In this instance I have to keep things consistent across the portfolio so those two things are mostly decided already. But with this being the only the second image to be printed there is still time to change my mind I guess.

Here is the problem for me.  After spending so many hours staring at the same image, concentrating on all the areas that I see as potential problems I begin to doubt the image’s worth. I guess I kinda get tired of looking at it. So for a while there this evening it seemed as if every test print that I made was coming out too flat, too dull, too tired. In reality I guess I’m the one who is tired, but it is at this point that I really begin to wonder if I’m just wasting my time. Is anyone ever going to even begin to appreciate what I see in these images? Making art is a risky proposition, actually producing something and then putting it out there for the world to see is taking a chance. Maybe there is nothing at all there in what I’m doing. I certainly don’t expect any other person on the planet to sit there looking at what I produce for 5+ hours in a single day. Do the master’s of the art world go through the same thing when they’re producing? I certainly know that the creation of a painting or sculpture can take even longer than what I’m doing right now. What drives them, what is driving me to do this with no guarantee of reward or even recognition? The question isn’t what is art, it’s why is art?

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Ten, twelve maybe 14 more to go. Today I finally buckled down and made some concrete decisions about how the portfolio would be printed. This involved sticking with my chosen paper (VFA) and deciding on how I would tone the inks for this series of prints. I had decided some time ago that I would start with the most difficult image in the group of candidates for the portfolio. The image that I’ve included with this post is pretty hard to appreciate on the web, or for that matter at any size less than 6×10″. It is the image that I’m probably the least sure of in this group of photographs. The reason that I kept in the portfolio along with everything else is because I think that it will work when combined with two others in order to make a triptych. When printed on a textured matte paper like VFA this photo has a certain type of subtle transition between paper white and the lightest shades of gray that make up the clouded waves.

The clouds in the waves that make up the images in this portfolio have inspired me to name this body of work Aqua-Valent which is a sort of play on the work of a rather famous early 20th centurty photographer.

In confirming my paper choice I printed several small copies of the image also on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 (HPR), H. Museum Etching and H. German Etching. Even though I really love the HGE it didn’t work as well with this image because the highlights suffered from a lack of separation within the upper 5% of image density. Museum Etching simply came across as a little flat when compared to the others, and its shadows seemed to suffer in a similar way as the highlights did on HGE. That left it to the pair of VFA and HPR, which are without a doubt two of the most highly regarded matte papers out there. And for good reason, the image really did look best on these two, VFA is able to generate a superior black to HPR, however as I’m sure anyone would notice, there just isn’t much black in this image at all. The biggest differences between HPR and VFA are the paper color and the texture. VFA is a bright white paper, while HPR has a creamier color close to that of a natural paper wihtout OBAs. HPR still has OBAs nonetheless and that is the reason why it looked superior to the Museum Etching paper.

In the end VFA won out because of the fact that I really like the way that this image (and I expect the others also) look on textured paper. I had envisioned that this image would be rendered on the matte paper in such a way as to look as if it were almost painted on. That effect is more readily achieved with the textured surface of VFA or even HGE. This image when printed large on a sheet of VFA came with the look I was after. I moved the white point of the image down so that small parts of the clouds would be clipped to paper white. The lightest gray shades then are allowed to more obviously stand out from the paper white, giving those paper white areas a painterly feel, while the texture of the paper kinda sorta mimics the texture that a brush would impart upon oil based paints applied to canvas.

Choosing a color tone for the b/w images was one of the easier decisions to make, well at least it was that way since I had to put aside building my own ink mixtures in QTR. For some reason I never seem to want to make my prints as a straight up neutral b/w. In previous posts I had described my quest for a certain type of sepia/selenium split effect. I also like my images printed up as slightly warm with the Epson ABW driver (H:5, V:5), to a deeper (H:10, V:10). While fooling around with toning the ABW driver I discovered an interesting combination (H:19, V:-33) that works quite well on the creamy or natural papers without OBAs. However this last combination didn’t seem to fit my image when printed on VFA. I finally wound up trying an ABW setting suggested by Clayton Jones in one of his paper chase articles. Using H:2, V:8 gives a slightly warm rendition that seems to work in a pleasing fashion with the brightened white of VFA. My test print using this setting came out looking pretty nice, not neutral gray, but also not too warm either. After examining the test print’s tone, shadows and highlight separation with this setting I was satisfied. With that last decision made I was able to prep and print the first image that will make up my first portfolio Aqua-Valent.

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