I had an hour. Nothing needing done, no one to see, one hour without demand. I had my camera and started to take a short walk. It was a hot, rainy, humid summer afternoon, the air thick with a haze and clouds. The kind of day people don’t go out for a casual stroll. Certainly not the kid of day for a beautiful photograph. Even so, I had an hour and I had to scratch the itch.
I know this river walk well. I have been up and down the river banks here over and over. I had to fight the notion that I have been here before, seen this before, photographed this before. I was looking for the unfamiliar in the familiar. It was a challenge.
“Guardians”, Mamiya 645 45mm f8 1/2sec, TriX 400
Quiet stillness, where the water meets the land. I could feel the thick air, hear a pin drop, and watch the water flow powerfully by as I set up my camera. If you didn’t pay attention it would seem like an unpleasant day but the river didn’t care. The land didn’t care. My camera didn’t care.
In my mind, the sounds of the boats on a sunny summer day, kids jumping off the barriers into the high water and fishermen casting lines echoed. This day, was not those days. I had one hour and this is what the world presented to me.
I could have easily not taken the camera out for this. Told myself the light is bad, or that I’ve been here before. I would have missed this moment if I hadn’t forced myself to get out, to look hard, stand and feel what was before me. But the itch… I had to scratch. I’m glad I did.
This isn’t an amazing photograph, it’s a good one for the day. It made me focus, leave the demands of everyday behind. For an hour I was in the creative flow and produced something I like. I encourage anyone to find any sliver of time for a creative pursuit. Chip away at the creative process. It helps clear the mind and over time, things build on themselves.
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I have normally used darkroom or a photo lab for my final prints. I love doing prints, especially if I frame them and hang them on the wall. Something about putting the print behind glass with a clean mat and frame around a print completes the whole process. Like adding the perfect watch and shoes to a suit. There isn’t anything more satisfying in photography when you can hang that print on a wall and look at it.
There is also the printed page. Many photographers goal is to publish a book or zine. With modern technology available it is very easy and affordable to self publish a body of work. The approach to printing work is vast nowadays. Yet, many still don’t print the photographs they make. Folks seem to want to stop at the phone screen and share it online to other screens. I have never gotten the satisfaction from stopping at a screen presentation as I have by taking my photographs all the way to paper.
Final framed 11×14 silver gelatin print
When print on demand came to the scene I started creating family albums of trips we would take with my extended family. I could print a dozen of these bound books with linen covers and pass them out to the family a few weeks after we all came home. They were well received and still sit on everyone’s bookshelves. The quality wasn’t offset press quality but that isn’t what mattered. The books can sit on a shelf and be picked up at anytime, flipped through and all the memories of the trip come flooding back. No screen required.
In a post I made earlier I shared that I am building out a darkroom space. It is slow going due to family and work obligations. Life always seems to get in the way of some things. Anyway, while I am still working on that I wanted to print some of my photographs and thought I would look at photo printer options. The last time I tried to get a print out of an inkjet printer that I was happy with was a long, long time ago, and it still wasn’t that great. Back then, at their best they couldn’t hold a candle to a wet darkroom print. Even with all the extra messing around with ink sets and RIPs etc. It wasn’t worth the money or the effort in my view.
Box of silver gelatin work prints for evaluation
Of course things have changed, inkjet printing has come a long way since then. I could have spent a lot of money for a printer but I didn’t want to drop over a thousand dollars on something I might or might not like and use. My real goal was simply to make nice prints of my work for myself that I could evaluate to see if it was worth sending to a lab or wet print myself when I have the darkroom complete. So I hit the used online market places looking for something that would print up to 13×19, print good quality black and white and be under $200 USD.
After a couple of weeks of looking I picked a Canon Pro printer up, in my local area, with full set of inks for $100 bucks. It was a gamble. Many times the printers sit with inks in them for years and are all dried up and crusty, clogged to the point of no return. I thought for $100 I would take the risk. I brought it home, set it up and hit the test print page and… it worked perfectly! I ran a cleaning cycle and print head alignment on it and have been using it ever since.
Sequencing and gathering of small inkjet prints for evaluation
For now, I use the printer to make small prints (5×7) of images I have only seen on screen so I can pin them up and live with them a while. Being small prints, it is easy to rearrange and practice sequencing for any books I may want to print. Another surprise was that when I see a bunch of these prints lying in front of me I can start to see some connections between them I wouldn’t have otherwise. This creates an opportunity for new bodies of work that I may not have seen before. It has been fun and a new exercise to add to my photography practice.
If you are a photographer, or know a photographer, that doesn’t print their work (a lot of it, not just the good ones) as part of their creative exploration, I would encourage you/them to do it regularly. It’s easy for me to tell you to do it and give the reasons I think it’s important, but the photographer that prints learns more about their work and where to go next when they work with prints rather than screens.
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I posted about this same waterfall a little while back. Talking about how I had pre-visualized the scene after I visited it a few times. When I was finally able to reach the falls AND there was actually water running I had my medium format gear with me. I knew the shot I wanted and that kit was exactly what I needed to get that shot.
Once I knew I had what I wanted I took another look around to see what other compositions there might be. Of course there were several others, but I didn’t have a longish lens that I needed for the Mamiya. That meant I would be back with a 35mm kit to get the next shot I saw in my head.
The set, up at a higher vantage point with a longer lens.
If I scrambled up the incline to the other side of the falls I could get just a peak of the stream that was coming down the ravine before it hit the drop. The scene also had a nice background of foliage that was a different value and uncluttered for a nice fall off up the ravine. To get this composition I needed just a little reach to frame it up, without a bunch of distractions in the frame.
This is where the longer lens came into play. I made the trek back to the waterfalls a few days after my first success with the medium format, but this time I had my Nikon 35mm and a couple of longer lenses. I hefted my gear back up the rise just off to the left of the falls and set up.
Composition through the viewfinder makes me think I should revisit with some color next time.
The composition worked just as I had hoped using the longer lens. It was a hot humid afternoon and the mosquitos were hungry. Thank goodness for bug spray. Even so, setting up with the bugs buzzing was not fun. Once I got it set up and into the zone it was a lot of fun just watching the water and the breeze flow and having this spot all to myself for an hour of restoration, regardless of the little buggers.
I am happy with the final photograph. It is pretty close to what I had envisioned in my mind. I might try another with a different developer. I used Rodinal on this roll and think it might be a little “crunchy” for this scene. I am still not decided because I have not printed the image yet. I always hold off on my final verdict until I can hold the photograph in my hands. So many times I think the image on screen is amazing, only be be underwhelmed when printed. Also, an image that is ho-hum on screen can really be beautiful on paper.
The funny thing is that now that I look at my phone snaps of the set up I am wondering if I need to explore this in color? My go to is usually black and white but lately I have been trying to develop an eye for good color photographs. I think in this case, the whole area is mostly brown sandstone and it overwhelmed my eye. But looking at the composition, with the compressed view of the long lens, now I see the nice color contrast and the warm light falling softly through the trees.
Another note in my log to return to this in the spring. Fingers crossed it’s not flooded or totally dry…
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