Musings on Photography

Well, after pondering yesterday for a bit on print size, I concluded that before I proceed with turning over my practice and adjusting the web site and so on just to standardize print sizes, it might be a good idea for me to actually make prints in the various sizes, put’em up on the wall, and gaze at them. You never know what sort of reaction theory will have when confronted with reality.

So I cranked out four prints, sized 10″x15, 12″x18″, 14″x21″, and 20″x30″, and I cleared off the work wall in my work room, and I put up the prints side by side, using my highly sophisticated temporary hanging technique (aka blu-tack).

So now, with the prints on the wall, I’ve made a cup of tea, and I’ve stood in front of the prints and pondered for a few minutes several times. This is a most interesting experiment, and given that I’ve got quite a lot of experience with prints of differing sizes and large prints, et al, I have to say that my first reaction each time I step up and look at the array of prints is that print size makes a big difference.

That is, there’s a big subjective difference to standing in front of the 20×30 compared to even the 14×21. I expected that, though, because the relative spacing between those two prints is larger than for the other ‘adjacent’ sizes. But there’s also a big difference between the 12×18 and the 14×21 - much bigger than I expected. And there’s a big difference between the 10×15 and the 12×18, too, and I didn’t expect that at all, to be perfectly honest.

Curiouser and curiouser. Clearly I have some thinking to do. And, if nothing else, I’m going to have to order up a pile of 20×24 frames, matboard, foamcore, and glazing. I had sort of hoped, in a vaguely optimistic way, that this experiment would demonstrate that I could settle on just three sizes, not four. But I’m finding I like the 12×18 print size (which would frame out to 20×24). I like it a lot.

When I was printing in the wet darkroom, and I was really trying to simplify things so that I could focus on stuff that really mattered, I settled on a single print size - roughly 10″x12.5″ on 11″x14″ paper. The aspect ratio changed slightly if I did minor cropping, but it ended up that essentially 100% of the prints I made were on 11″x14″ paper. That made life easy, because the single standard for paper size meant that I also had a single standard for mat board size, frame size, storage box size, and I only needed to stock those sizes.

Then I started printing digitally, and it suddenly became trivially easy for me to print pretty much any size I wanted. I had a 44″ wide printer, so I could (and did) print really big prints. That was an interesting exercise, but it turns out that there are very few places in the world where you can hang really large prints, so I didn’t make a lot. The next printer I got was only 24″ wide, and it seems to be plenty.

So I now stock paper for the printer in rolls, in two widths: 17″ and 24″. I don’t find myself making small prints very often. The most common print size, far and away, is a 10″x15″ print on 14″x17″ paper. I make larger prints, too - 15″x22″ prints, and 20″x30″, and very occasionally 22″x33″. So those two roll widths really cover things. I can print virtually any size I want, but the reality is that if the print is going to be framed, you’re right back to either the inefficiency of framing in a non-standard size, or else you’re framing the print out to one of the standardized photo sizes: 11×14, 16×20, 20×24, 22×28, 32×40.

As I go through revising my website, I’m trying hard to really simplify and cut things back to the essentials. Rather than sell prints at a lot of different sizes, I think I’ll just sell them in a few, standardized sizes. If I never sell anything smaller than 10×15 (which frames out to 16×20), that limits me to stocking foamcore and matboard and frames and glazing in just those four standard sizes. I don’t like selling smaller prints, because I think the smaller prints always lack something.

That pretty much reduces things to selling prints in those four sizes: say, 10×15 (which frames out to 16×20), 12×18 (frames out to 20×24), 14×21 (frames out to 22×2 and 20×30 (frames out to 32×40). 12×18 is an interesting size to me, primarily because I haven’t really framed things out to 20×24 very often, so it’s a new size to me.

Anyway, as I was pondering on all this, it occurred to me that all of these print sizes except the largest (20×30) could be printed on a printer that has a 17″ wide carriage and handles roll paper. Printing 14×21 (or even 15×22 if you frame a little tighter) on a 17″ wide roll still leaves room for acceptably wide margins - at least one inch all the way ’round.

It’s a shame that in order to get the great features that come with the larger printers (like the auto-profiling of the z3100, use of cheaper big capacity ink cartridges, and so on) you have to get a carriage that’s wider than you probably need. I’m betting the vast majority of photographers have only occasional need for prints they can’t make on a 17″ printer.

There’s no great insight, here. I’m just amused that it took this long for me to come around to seeing that the whole ’standard size’ issue hasn’t gone away just because I have a printer than can make sheets of arbitrary length and will print images of arbitrary size. In the end the print probably gets put in one of a few standard size frames with standard size mat board, and the push to a few standard size prints is still there.

Two interesting things have arrived here at my house in the past few days:

• A 17″ x 50′ roll of Crane’s Museo Portfolio Rag. This is a heavyweight matte surface paper. The base is about the same color as Crane Museo Max, but the surface finish is much more like hot press watercolor. Not quite as smooth as Epson Ultrasmooth, but very close. It’s very slightly warmer than Ultrasmoooth - you can see the difference when they’re side by side but might have trouble seeing the difference if they were on opposite sides of the room. I’m hoping this will have all the properties (gamut, dmax, and feel) of Crane Museo Max but without the cold press watercolor finish which irks me slightly. I will be evaluating this paper over the next few weeks, assuming that my HP Z3100 woes get worked out (more on this in another post).
• A 2TB Western Digital MyBook Pro Edition II external disk. This is actually two 1TB disk drives in an external cabinet that provides FOUR interfaces: USB2.0, 1394a (aka Firewire 400), 1394b (aka Firewire 800), and eSata. The two disk drives can be configured in a variety of ways, including appearing as one big disk with 2TB capacity and in mirror mode as one redundant disk with 1TB capacity. My eventual plan is that this disk and a Mac Mini will replace my aging and ailing 1TB raid fileserver. It cost $640 from Newegg.com, and it represents what I think is a pretty inexpensive way to get redundant storage in a small cabinet. I’ve read reports that the unit is noisy, which might be a problem. More on this as I get a chance to play with it.

My recent experiences with slideshows on the Mac got me thinking. The ongoing discussion about the resolution/Pixel density of the Nikon D3, along with the news about the pixel density of the newly announced Apple iPod - that got me thinking even more.

The pixel density for displays, back in the good old days, was 72 pixels/inch. Oh, if you had a really high resolution display adaptor and a really good CRT display, you could get it higher, but 72ppi was pretty much the norm. Nowadays, LCD displays seem to have a pixel density more like 100 ppi. That’s the density on the MacBook Pro I’m typing this on, for instance.

The pixel density on the recently revamped iPod Nano is, according to Apple, the highest pixel density they’ve ever shipped in a product. It’s apparently a QVGA (320×240) 2″ display, which works out to about 200 pixels per inch. Call it double the resolution of the screen I’m looking at. And the display of the newly announced Nikon D3 is 640×480 (after we sort out all the nonsense stuff about the difference between dots and pixels) in a 3″ display, which works out to 240 ppi.

Naturally, as the pixel density increases, the maximum resolution you can display rises as well. One of the main arguments against viewing photos on a computer display has always been that the resolution of the computer display was hopelessly inadequate. At 72ppi, that’s pretty much true. You look at a 72ppi screen, and the phrase ‘high resolution’ doesn’t exactly spring to mind with the speed of summer lightning. At 100 ppi, things are looking better. At 200 ppi, things are looking good; at 240 ppi, they’re really looking good. At 300 or 360 ppi, we start to encounter arguments that adding resolution won’t help much because at normal viewing distances our unaided eye can no longer see the difference.

I will here wave my hands about and make funny faces and strange noises to distract you, and while you are thus distracted ignore the fact that similar claims of “so good it can’t get better” have been made before, and then disproven (think digital audio). The point is not that some fixed pixel density is sufficient for all needs. The point is that lately, the higher resolution is becoming available, the costs are falling, and the computing power needed to drive displays with much higher resolution is everywhere. There’s a world of difference between fabricating a 3″ diagonal 240 ppi display, and fabricating a 30″ 240 ppi display. But I expect that in the end, I’ll be able to drive to the Apple store and buy a replacement for my 30″ Cinema HD that instead of being 100ppi will be more like 300ppi. Not next week, but within my actuarial lifetime as a productive photographer.

Now, viewing a photograph on a display and viewing a print are not the same. The display emits light, the print reflects it. So the display is (ignoring second order effects) more or less independent of ambient lighting, and to look really good, a print needs to be generously lit. (Here’s the formula for adjusting the lighting to the optimum intensity for displaying prints: hang the print on the wall. Increase the brightness of the lights shining on the print until the print starts to smoke. Back the lights off until the print no longer smokes. Stop.)

And, although the furor over dMax of inks, papers, and printing technology seems to have died down of late, it’s still important. A good printing technology will give you a usable dMax of, say, somewhere between 1.8 logD and 2.4 logD. That corresponds to between 6 and 8 stops between dMax and dMin. But the display I’m looking at right now has a contrast ratio of 1000:1 - 10 stops between the darkest and lightest. 10 stops. Ten stops. I’m not going to claim that a wider range is the holy grail of photo display, but I’m pretty sure that 2 to four stop difference is part of why I look at stuff on my screen and think “Holy Cats, that looks good” and then look at the print and think “Um, not so much.”

Color gamut is another story. There are colors I can print but can’t display on my LCD monitors. There are colors I can display on the monitor but can’t print - interestingly, they seem to be mostly very light colors and very dark ones, and those are often the colors I struggle with when printing. All told I’d say I’d call the color gamut issue a win for the monitor, but the fact is that they are mostly *different* and not better or worse.

And so my question is this: when displays offer similar size and resolution to the prints we make on our printers, and the displays offer better options for color, better dynamic range, and so on, what properties of the print will remain that will mean that photographers continue to make prints? Will prints become a thing of the past, or will the object properties of print (the surface finish, the weight and hand of the paper, no need for a power source) mean that despite their limitations, prints are still what we think of as the natural end point of the photographic process?

My plans for this winter include a renewed focus on printing (especially color), both older images and newer work. I’d like to spend some of the dark dreary months playing with new papers. I have a lot of plans for keeping my spirits up during the Great Darkness that is winter in the PNW by filling huge trashcans with duffer prints.

My Epson 9600 is now two generations back from the leading edge, and dealing with new papers means sending test prints out for profiles, one week turnaround, etc. And I’ve been impressed by the print quality I’ve seen from the HP z3100.

So, just five minutes ago, I ordered a 24″ z3100. John at JVH Technical tells me I should have it real darn quick. I’ve been pondering this particular move for months now - basically, ever since I went over and helped my friend Rob set his up and saw the prints that came off it.

I’m looking forward to having it arrive.

Way back at the very end of June, I was contacted by Chris Bradley-Kidd of Fixerlabs.com, asking if I’d tried their product SizeFixer for upsizing. Apparently his attention had been attracted by my article on the myths of upsizing. He offered to send me a free copy of SizeFixer if I was interested in reviewing their product. After nailing down a few details, I agreed to do a review of SizeFixer.

Now, this all was happening just as I was switching from Windows to the Mac. I ordered a copy of SizeFixer XL for the Mac, and it arrived in the middle of July, just as I was in the thick of several things all at once. SizeFixer was on the stack of things to do, but other stuff kept burying it.

This past weekend, during a brief slow period, I installed the software and started playing with it. I only had a few hours, and this was a problem because the software is slow. Now, I’m not talking ‘resizing an image takes a couple of minutes’ slow, I’m talking ‘resizing a full frame image from the EOS-5d with the quality cranked all the way to the max takes 5.5 hours’ slow.

I had some problems, and I’ve fired off a set of questions to FixerLabs. Hopefully I’ll get answers quickly and I and proceed with more testing. The results I got this past weekend were simultaneously encouraging and disappointing. They’re encouraging in that if I could get the speed problems ironed out, and figure out exactly what all the controls do so that I could eliminate some unpleasant artifacts, the results would be pretty impressive. Discouraging in that the documentation seems to be on the sketchy side, the artifacts are pretty ugly, and the software is so slow that it’s not exactly easy to figure things out just by experimenting.

More news as things develop, as it were.

In this post on superstition and the color accuracy of laptop screens, Rosie Perera commented

With all this talk about color accuracy, it seems poetic justice that the photo you posted today was black & white.

Rosie’s razzing me, here, but her comment reminds me of an interesting point which I think is often either misunderstood or else overlooked.

We tend to think of black and white photos as just that - black in the dark bits, white in the light bits, and a mixture of black and white in varying proportions for the bits in between.  It’s a reasonable thought - when we shoot with black and white film, the film essentially records luminance, and all of the color information (what would fall in the a and b channels in Lab space) is just thrown away.  At that point, we really have produced a black and white photo - the color gamut of the image is essentially nothing more than a straight line between Dmin and Dmax - no volume to the gamut at all.

The problem occurs when we want to turn this black and white photo into a print, either one that we can hold in our hands, or one that is displayed on the screen.  When we do this, we’re taking this image that has an incredibly narrow gamut (just a line, remember?) and we’re going to translate the image into the color space of that display medium.  And when we go to do this, we get some rather big and unpleasant surprises.

The first surprise is that, in the color space of the display device (the screen, or the printer, etc.) our ability to represent colors that lie on the L axis of the LAB color space is not as good as we naively expected.  We’re up against two problems, here.  The first is that the color accuracy of the device is not perfect, so when we specify ‘give me a perfectly neutral 18% grey’, what we get instead is the best job the device can do at a perfectly neutral 18% grey, which only in the rarest of cases is going to be exactly a perfectly neutral 18% grey.  It’ll be just barely off the axis.  Sad, but true.

The second, and closely related suprise is this: the human visual system is incredibly, fantastically good at detecting very slight variations from neutral.  You can take a perfectly neutral grey, add an homeopathically small quantity of blue to it, show it to another human, and that human will tell you that the grey is slightly cold.  The upshot is that when we take our conceptually perfectly neutral black and white image, and we print it on our inkjet printer (or display it on our screen) what we are expecting to see is a range of perfectly neutral greys ranging from Dmax to Dmin.  What we see instead is a range of color, ranging from the darkest the display device can produce up to the ‘base’ color, and in between we have a range of colors which are tantalizingly, frustratingly, achingly close to neutral but which our amazing vision tells us are ‘blue’ or ‘magenta’ or ‘yellow’ or ‘green’.  Needless to say, this is not the desired effect.

The upshot is that one of the most demanding tests of color accuracy is to use a device to display a perfectly neutral black and white image.  The human visual system will ruthlessly expose every inaccuracy, every spot on the image where some shade of grey is not perfectly neutral.  An image like the one above, with the greyscale stretched out considerably, is a particularly difficult challenge.

You can spend quite a lot of time getting your device tuned up to the point where it passes the ‘very long perfectly neutral gradient doesn’t show any color shifts’ test.  It takes a really good profile, a device with no drift over time, and attention to all the color management settings. 

The ultimate irony is that you didn’t really want a perfectly neutral ‘black and white’ print anyway, because they look peculiarly dead and lifeless.  Perhaps in another post I’ll tackle why.

Ed Richards asks

How do you feel about prints as objects? Things to feel and touch, the effect of different papers?

I like prints.  I like big prints, and if I had infinite wall space, I’d probably make a lot more big prints than I do.  But I also like medium prints, and most of the prints I make are 10"x15" these days.  That’s big enough to be able to see what’s going on with the photo, but small enough that you can fit them into a nice portable box or portfolio case.  I like small prints, too, although I don’t seem to have the same reverence for the small print that the ‘quiet photography’ folks do.

But in comparision to viewing photos on a screen, or viewing photos projected (either slides or a projection monitor) I think prints beat the screen all hollow.  I like holding the print in my hands, I like the fact that it’s a real, physical object with its own concrete existence.  I understand completely that there are photographers for whom it doesn’t matter if the process doesn’t end in a physical object, but for me, the process doesn’t feel complete until I’ve got a real print in my hands.

In other words, my views about the reproducibility, uniqueness, and value of the print have changed with my switch to digital printing.  But the value of actual prints in my process, and the satisfaction I get from making prints is still the same.

One of the things I really like about digital printing is that I can stick a wide variety of papers into my printer, and get results that are different.  In some cases, the differences directly affect the qualities of the print (dMax, for instance).  But in most cases when I choose one paper over another, it’s a matter of what I think of as the physical properties of the paper - the way it feels in your hand, the flexibility and weight and thickness, the surface texture, and so on. 

That’s one of the reasons why I’d like to own an HP z3100 - the built in profiling would allow me access to far more papers than my current Epson 9600 does.  And the built in profiling would let me evaluate papers with a lot less effort (and a smaller quantity of paper) than I currently can.  If there’s a reason I haven’t yet bought a z3100, it’s that I know that the instant I have it up and running, I’ll launch into a frenzy of paper evaluation.

I know that there are folks who feel that digital photography and on screen viewing of photos signals the death of the print.  But my view is that eventually, photographers who don’t print their work will find the on-screen experience disappointing, and they’ll turn to printing.

And I think the current tidal wave of new papers, inks, printers, etc. are the beginning of a great golden age of the photographic print.

One of the things that’s been most interesting about my friend Rob getting a new HP Z3100 has been that as a result we’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at/comparing profiles, and thus we’ve started to get a grip on just what profiles tell you about what you can expect to see if you make a print on one material or another.

This got me thinking about an easy way to compare one technology (say, inkjet printing) to another technology (say, RA-4 papers).  It seemed to me that if we just had profiles describing the characteristics of an RA-4 paper (like, for instance, Fuji Crystal Archive), then we’d just load it up along with the profile for, say Crane Museo Max on the Z3100, compare the two, and learn a lot.  It turns out that virtually any lab that does custom prints on a LightJet or Lamda provides such profiles to its customers so that they can tweak out their images just so before sending them to be printed.  And those profiles are exactly what the doctor ordered.

The first order observation is that, in the low tones, Fuji Crystal Archive has a much wider gamut.  If you’re printing color, and you want lots of color separation in the shadows, Fuji Crystal Archive will give you better results than Crane Museo Max on an HP Z3100 (and Crane Museo Max was the best in the lowlights of the non-barrier papers we tested).  Conversely, Crane Museo Max on the Z3100 has a broader gamut in the highlights - so if color separation in the highlights is what your prints are about, Crane Museo Max on the Z3100 will give you better results.

Mike comments:

I’ve got prints on my walls that are over 20 years old. They still look as good as the day they came out of the wash. And as far as I can tell no one’s proven that this inkjet stuff will last that long.

Because of my heavy focus on enjoying the process, and the fact that I view prints as being of relatively little importance, I’m probably not as worried about print longevity as some folks are.  I confess that I don’t understand the extremes of passion that are directed toward archival processing, etc. when it’s manifestly true that for all but a handful of photographers working today, the eventual fate of all of our physical prints will be that our grandchildren will shuffle through them, think “Old Grandpa sure was a weird guy”, and tip the entire thing into the trash.  If every print made lasted forever, then we’d eventually be neck deep in prints, folks.  Not everything important needs to last forever.

But one thing I don’t understand is this: the implicit assumption seems to be that, since there are gelatin silver prints around that are 20 years old, (or 60 years old, or 100 years old) we can expect that ALL gelatin silver prints will last that long.  That’s rubbish.  We have gelatin silver prints that have been around for a long time because there were so very many made, and they’ve been processed in a staggeringly wide variety of ways, and then stored in an even wider variety of ways.  And a very small minority of them have survived.  Folks who crow about the demonstrated longevity of gelatin silver prints are conveniently ignoring the millions and millions of gelatin silver prints which have NOT lasted.

Now, I understand that the argument goes “Yes, some GSPs have not lasted very long.  But we now have Archival Processing, and so OUR prints will last forever.”  The problem with this argument is that exactly what Archival Processing is has changed over time.  First, it was two bath fixing.  Then it was the Ilford quick fix process.  Everyone thought that selenium toning would guarantee prints that lasted forever, and then Kodak changed the formulation of Rapid Selenium Toner and eliminated the (previously considered unimportant) trace ingredient that was providing the protection, so lots of prints that everyone thought were archivally processed were, in fact, not.

And, to be honest, I think the whole ‘archivally processed’ thing is more marketing hype than anything else.  A while back, I decided to take a survey of exactly what this much ballyhooed ‘archival process’ was, so I sent email to wide swath of photographers who claimed that the prints they sold were ‘archivally processed’ on their web sites.  About half of those who responded said that they just followed the archival standard, but could not point me to a copy of the standard.  About a quarter told me that they used the old, now discredited minimal selenium toning technique.  And about a quarter said that they’d done residual fixer testing, and anything that passed was by definition archival.  I didn’t consider all this to be very promising.  Face it, there is no ‘archival standard’.  Folks who claim that their processing meets archival standards are, as far as I can tell, blowing smoke and asking you to watch the pretty mirrors.

But the killer is this: because of longevity concerns, resin coated gelatin silver papers have undergone heavy accelerated aging testing.  We have some sense of how long they’ll last.  Likewise the various color processes.  Inkjet printing, too.  But I can find NO such testing for conventional, fiber based gelatin silver papers.  Apparently, it doesn’t exist.  And, to make matters worse, we can’t even extrapolate from the performance of previous years papers.  NONE of the currently marketed traditional gelatin silver papers are the same as they were just a decade ago.  Emulsion formulations have changed repeatedly.  Suppliers have changed, and so the trace impurities (which often have big effects on longevity) have also changed.  So if you’re currently printing on gelatin silver papers, even if you’re using what you believe to be archival processing techniques, you’ve simply got no testing at all to back up your beliefs about the longevity of your prints.  None.  (hint - almost all of the research on things like using toners for permanence were done to preserve (wait for it…) microfilm records, not continuous tone photographs)

At least with inkjet prints, you can fall back on the accelerated aging and fade tests.  They may not be much but they’re better than nothing.  I don’t trust the Wilhelm accelerated aging tests farther than I can throw them (which is just about to the end of the decade) but I trust them more than nothing at all.

And a little perspective is helpful, too, when you’re deciding how much energy and worry to invest in the longevity thing.  At a workshop, John Sexton told a story about how his earliest photographs were of drag racing.  And, he said, they weren’t really all that good.  The good news is that when he made them he knew next to nothing about proper processing, so most of his embarassing work is now gone.  From this I take the lesson that worrying about print longevity is, for me, putting the cart before the horse.  When I can make photographs that are good enough to make them worth preserving forever, I’ll start worrying about making them last forever.  Until then, I’ll work on the art part.