Wadesville, PennsylvaniaI've never been much convinced that there's a specific, definitive, best shot of a subject. For that matter, I don't think much of the idea of a definitive print. If I return to a negative done twenty years ago, I think it would be ridiculous to attempt to print it exactly as I did back then (if the materials are even available). I make better prints now than I did twenty, or ten, or thirty, years ago, and the picture, if it's worth printing again, deserves the best I can do now. Seems to me.
I'm also not sure I should have to choose which of these I like better. The firehouse is almost the only building still standing in Wadesville, which is being eaten away by a coal strip mine, owned as you might guess, by the Reading Coal Company. I also posted about this a while ago, but it took me till now to catch up with the big camera negatives.
Wadesville, Pennsylvania
6 comments:
Carl, I agree totally and don't understand the 'best' mentality (or the 10 best of ....). Consider one of the most famous images: "Moonrise". There are about 1600 of them out there and academics/critics will argue which 'decade' is the best: before intensification, the 60's prints, the 80's prints. Maybe Ansel was just acting on his own vision of what the image should be, maybe just acting on the whims of the marketplace and what he thought the current 'look' was photos. So, there is no 'right' image. As far which view is correct, we are all just working out problems, most of which we are probably not aware of. why is it can a negative be ignored when made only to 'rediscovered' by the photographer much later with the question 'damn that's good, why haven't I printed this?'. And I don't mean to imply that photographers are taking a 'shotgun' approach to a scene, different views/methods lead to different feelings/insights to what is being worked on. One other question, are these new prints? Is your darkroom not shut down due to the cold? (ps, sorry for the long post/rant - it's friday!)
Good Friday rant, Lyle. Interesting ideas really. As for 'prints,' these are scans direct from the negatives for possible digital printing at above-contact size. I'm digital darkroom only until spring.
I really liked the last show of 'above contact size' for the drive-in's that you had. Having seen the contact pt/pd prints, the (and I use the term) 'slightly' larger digital prints was eye-opening for me: what is the important information that a negative carries? The relationship of the different tonalities within the contact and the slightly bigger print - not the difference between the processes, but the differences within each. As we have been talking about, there is no best 'print' within a method, maybe there is no best between methods (an area not explored more because of the inherit difficulties of making negatives to match the print). Another question: while you have the digital work, does it bother you that you can't get into the darkroom? My access has been limited for the last couple of months due to landlord decisions out of my control. The other day I loaded film holders then said, "why bother, can't develop the film anyway". Do other readers of this blog ever have 'access' problems and if so, what do you do about to stay sane?
It's frustrating, Lyle, but not as much as if I didn't have the digital darkroom as well. However, there's a problem with that too. I had to upgrade my main computer and got a new Mac late last month, and ran right into the problem of the latest Mac OS not printing correctly out of Photoshop with the latest Epson print drivers. With my Pro Stylus 4800 color management is broken: I can print b&w using the Epson driver (actually a good approach) but anything with color management turned on in PS prints too dark, and none of the three companies is stepping up to fix the problem. So my new computer is very nice, but if I want to print in color or in color-managed b&w treatments, I have to drag the old computer downstairs and hook it up to the printer. Not as bad as being frozen out of the regular darkroom, but far from ideal.
I can't confirm this from anything 'official' from Adobe, but I was told that the Photoshop folks will regularly change how the color definitions are sent to the printer within the product from release to release. Of course, printer drivers change from printer to printer and release to release. If this is all true, how do you folks working in digital color stay sane? I mean, I get worried when Rising Bristol prints different from one batch to the next!
In fact, color management has been like clockwork for me for over 5 years with Photoshop CS, CS2, and CS3 under Mac OS 10.3xx and 10.4xx with an Epson 2200 and then a pro 4800.
The problem is between the newest Mac OS, 10.6, and a 4800 driver that Epson's customer support *says* is good for 10.6 even though the written description only claims through 10.5: the combination results in broken color management out of Photoshop. Apple's big download of supported printer drivers for 10.6 conspicuously leaves out the pro 4800 as well.
Until this foul-up though, digital printing has been far more reliable for me than new batches of Rising, or Stonehenge or Platine.
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