PART FIVE | Artist formerly known as…
Prints. It is safe to say that photography was once, solely a print media. If the image wasn’t tangible in some way, then no one would ever see it.
Ever since humans could manipulate and capture light onto paper, we have been obsessed about taking pictures of everything.
In 1975 Kodak invented the first digital camera. It took until 1995 for a Casio consumer model to become available but the following decades saw a complete shift in how we looked at images.
Print labs and processes that were hundreds of years old were seemingly lost overnight other than to a niche Group of traditionalists.
For a long time nothing could compare to the ‘quality’ of an analogue image. Colour science and digital sensors have come a long way since those early cameras and now digital images can more than hold their own with the analogue medium.
Not only have the cameras improved but the processes behind and aside of them.
Papers and inks have been redesigned and improved, print labs have found a way to marry technologies that mean now a digital audience has means to print, hold and view images as they once were originally intended. On a wall, in a frame and enjoyed.
My grandad was a very keen photographer, focusing mainly on trains, landscapes and family holidays. His idol was Ansel Adams, a pioneer of the zone system that revolutionised post processing in the dark room.
Software such as photoshop, lightroom and capture1 all create results that were initially created by such pioneers.
I inherited Norman’s medium format camera and from this I fell in love with photography.
in 2020, I have long since moved along to the digital medium and I embrace it. What I embrace less is the fast pace of this ‘medium’ where quantity often outweighs quality.
I can take thousands of images in a day using the ‘spray and pray’ method. But sometimes I relish just taking my time for a single shot. Or equally as satisfying is catching a chance moment.
Impatience still holds me and I can turn to my laptop to start the process of editing. One of my favourite aspects of photography and videography, it’s here that a photo becomes an image. Where pre-visualisation meets technical competency and learning.
Within moments I can send an image to a print lab and have them make the most out of my camera’s incredible colour science and my editing suite. When they mix these with their knowledge, technology, archive quality inks and papers, nothing compares to seeing an image in print.
