Morven Photo: Words

There was some discussion about printing in early August on Morven Photoblog which you can find on the image Engine Wheel. My harddrive is full with images that have never been seen by anybody else - in some cases this is probably no bad thing, but there are a number of good photos which have never seen the light of day. Very few of the images you will find on my Photoblog have been printed.

The March of Digital Photography

As most of you who have been interacting with me on this subject know, I am a big fan of digital photography and find that it brings me personally a great deal of pleasure. It has lots of advantages over film photography such as the instantaneous result, the costs of film, the ability to transmit electronically to name but a few - though this article is not seeking to make any point about whether it is better or worse, perhaps that will form the basis for a later discusssion. Indeed, a number of people are reverting back to film having become disillusioned with digital for whatever reason - only yesterday David Kapp announced in his article The Beginning a New Chapter in my Photography that he has sold his digital equipment and focus primarily on film photography.

A Drawback of Digital

The biggest drawback of digital photography seems to be the whole issue of workflow stopping at the point where the image is stored to disk. This is not normally an option with the film workflow. Yes, I know it is possible to move to the negative stage and not print out, or to produce contact print sheets , but the vast majoriy of photographers move straight to a presentable image either a slide or a positive print.

Judi, my wife, gets extremely upset with me that images are not easily portable and showable - yes I own a phototainer device and a laptop and I can put them onto CD/DVD to play o a TV (though never do the latter since doing it once to prove it could be done). She has a point, why am I doing all this stuff if it remains hidden? This is one of the reasons which provoked me to start photoblogging.

Discussions in person and on the web such as those mentioned above suggest that I am not particularly unusual in this respect and that there must be millions if not billions of unseen photographs languishing in the great digital graveyard.

Why is This?

It is not clear why people are reluctant to print, but perhaps the following are some of the reasons. This is written from an amateur standpoint - for pros there is probalby a financial incentive to get the printing issue licked

1. Colour Matching - though there are a range of devices on the market now to support people colour profiling their equipment, my personal experience is that this problem is far from solved (I have never tried really expensive kit, so perhaps the pros do not have these problems, but that remains doubtful). I have wasted a fortune on printing certain images being disappointed with how they print out.
2. Lack of Need - as mentioned above, one of the advantages of digital is that the image is visible much earlier in the workflow and the requirement to print to view the product of our creativity is simply not there.
3. The Problem of Selection - which images to print. With film it was easy, the answer was all of them, now we have to engage in the process to decide.
4. Laziness - simply not getting round to it. Perhaps being busy shooting the next batch.

Home Printing or Lab Printing

I have tried both of these, though I have my eye on a printer upgrade (I am looking at the Epson R800 and R1800, though by the time I get around to buying one they will probably be out of date). The main problem with home printing for me is the time and aggravation factor, though it has the advantage of not having to leave home.

The problem with labs is the overwhelming choice and in this whole issue of printing photographers as a group seem to be suffering from Choice Overload.

This does seem to be a specifically ‘photographer’ issue, my mother-in-law who is a technophobe has just purchased a simple camera and 6×4 printer package and happliy prints out her images without a computer and she has certainly never heard of ‘Photoshop’, ‘RAW’ or ‘Monitor Calibration’ or any of the other angst inducing vocabulary of the ‘photographers’. She is not alone in this, and a number of non-photographer friends are buying into this type of system now where you get a 50 or 100 package of ink and paper and churn out the images.

A Further Issue

As the number of images on my hard drive grows, the whole issue of sorting them and retrieving them is becoming difficult. The images are stored logically and it is possible to scan through them all, but having dabbled with a couple of database management systems, the problem seems to be the discipline required to construct and maintain the database of keywords.

That will perhaps be a future subject.

I would be very interested to hear your views on this subject.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 5:00 am and is filed under Workflow, Printing, Image Organisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.