Digital in context

 

The Road to Mount Melville

I thought I’d show the first print that got me thinking I should maybe stick with digital. It’s a country scene a mile or so from my home in St Andrews taken on the D700. Normally I’m hopeless with titles but I called this one The Road to Mount Melville and quite like that, Mount Melville being a well-to-do little hamlet half a mile along the road.

Had I shot this on film then I’d have been starting with a very low contrast neg that would have required grade 4 or 5 for a bit of oomph. I like photographing in the mist but I’m not keen on literal interpretations that reproduce those same low contrast misty conditions in the print.

It wasn’t difficult to boost the contrast to an appropriate degree in Photoshop and then carry out a number of other wee tweaks to bring a bit of life to what was a fairly bleak scene.

Of course, getting an image to look one way on a computer screen and the same way in an inkjet print is the tricky bit. It’s what put me off digital the first time around. Back then, it was harder getting nice, neutral black and white prints unless you really knew your onions and I lacked the necessary knowledge and skills.

The Road to Mount Melville showed me that it was possible to get convincing and satisfying prints from my old Epson 1400 set-up and at a cheaper cost than the film/darkroom route. In fact, it was working out cheap enough that the first three "proper" prints I made were done on A3 or A3+ paper.

This is a stitch of two Rolleiflex shots I took of Brouwersgracht, Amsterdam, when I was about 20. I couldn’t get both sides of the canal in the shot so I took this approach with a view to sticking two physical prints together. The Photoshop way was a lot easier.

Unlikely as it may seem, given the title of this blog, I was never a traditionalist when it came to digital. In fact, I was scanning negs back in the ‘90s and have been a Photoshop user since version 5 in 1998. I saw the potential straightaway although good digital cameras weren’t really affordable back then, hence the scanning.

My first digital camera was the Minolta A2 - which was highly recommended by the late Michael Reichmann - in 2004/05. I still have it and it’s a great wee camera. A Pentax K10D - another fine camera - followed in 2006 and the D700 another couple of years later. So, although I love film, my digital background probably extends back further than most current digital shooters.

What persuaded me to give up digital and go back to film was mainly to do with printing frustrations. I went through four or five inkjet printers searching for a good, neutral black and white print - and couldn’t find it on a consistent basis although I got a handful of nice prints at that time and a couple I really love.

The closest I came was using only the black ink to print grayscale images rather than the printer’s preference for attempting to make black and white by mixing all the colour inks together. The “black only” prints had a slight grittiness to them that looked a bit like 35mm Tri X printed in the darkroom, which was fine by me except that it didn’t suit every subject.

At the start of the year I thought I’d pick up a cheap secondhand Epson printer and have a go at something I’d long fancied - printing using two or more black cartridges for greyscale images. Two blacks, each with their own, different dither patterns, produce smoother prints than a single black doing all the work.

As it turns out, I’m using black, light magenta and yellow cartridges to produce prints that are not only neutral but have a sepia tone in the highlights which I can switch on and off at will. The light magenta neutralises the print and the sepia adds a little warmth to the lighter tones for a look that is a bit like Bill Schwab and Michael Kenna prints.

Old barn interior, Carnoustie. This was the third A3 print I made with the Epson.

To cut a long story short, I now feel that this is the first time in more than 40 years of taking photographs that I can visualise a picture at the taking stage and deliver the finished print that matches that vision. But I doubt I’ll be giving up film and darkroom work completely. I still have a lot of 35mm negatives that scanning doesn't do justice to so I’ll be making darkroom prints from them when I get the chance.

I've been wary of going on too much about the inkjet prints I'm getting to Phil of Fogblog infamy in case he ends up flying too close to the event horizon of the digital black hole and can't find his way back but he assures me that there's no danger of that, even though his Sony digital camera makes mine look antediluvian.