Archives for May 2008

Taking a picture, part six: black and white digital printing

Thanks for your interest in my “Taking a Picture” series. Just as a note, I have continued improving my digital workflow and some of these notes are now out-of-date. Feel free to drop a line in the comments or contact me directly if you would like more information on my photographic workflow.

I’ve been planning to sit down and write this for quite a while, but I’ve been keeping very busy with other things. The fact that it is currently hailing outside has given me the chance to spend some quality time indoors, though. Much like my previous post on scanning, I am going to try to avoid going into excruciating detail on every step of my digital printing workflow, because I don’t think it will be worth reading for most people. The general ideas are more important, and I am glad to answer any specific questions in the comments or offline. That’s not to say this won’t be a very technical post, and a long one at that. Please remember that I am giving this final print away to someone who has commented on one of the posts in the series, so feel free to drop a line even if it’s just to say hello.

Black and white inkjet printing felt like a very daunting subject when I first approached it. Two years ago, I had a low-end HP inkjet printer which made acceptable 8×10 color prints, but was absolutely lousy for black and white. It was impossible to get profiles for non-HP papers, and there was practically no information about archival permanence for the paper and inks I was using. In short, I wanted to create black and white prints on matte paper that looked as good as or better than what I could produce in the darkroom, and I wanted them to last a very long time. So I took the plunge into the deep waters of selecting a printer and building a solid black and white digital printing workflow.
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Nevins Street

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

I am quite happy with the way these Polaroid photographs from the last couple of months have been coming out. The addition of color, compared to the black and white I usually shoot, feels light and easy; the freedom of using a handheld camera again is something else altogether. When I look back to a couple of years ago, taking pictures on these exact same streets, I am pretty amazed. I’ve been taking this same route to work for years now, but I feel like I’m seeing everything just a bit differently these days.

I want to believe

When I was four or five, my grandparents moved into a new house in Joshua Tree, California. Shortly after they moved in, they discovered that the previous owner, who had built the house, had died at home just a year before.

Self Portrait

People insist that I will like dancing if I just give it a try. Or cilantro. “How could anyone hate cilantro?”, they ask. I say, at 31 years old, there are a few things I do know: I don’t like to dance, I don’t like cilantro, and I prefer to photograph landscapes. So this is what you get when a landscape photographer takes a self portrait.

Gowanus in Polaroid

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

The SX-70 gave me a lot of trouble today. Weird mechanical glitches caused a lot of over-exposed and blurry frames. At one point, it jammed and then spat three pieces of film at me all at the same time, all unexposed. I guess that’s what I get for buying a 30 year old camera on eBay for 20 bucks. I’m on the lookout for a spare.