Is printing alive and well?

[tnargs]

I used to print what I thought good or interesting on A3+ Hahnemuehle paper on my HP B9180. Then, at one stage, I discovered that the printer had stopped being produced and that HP themselves couldn't offer the complete range of eight inks at a time that I wanted to replace a few of them. Some well-meaning friends pointed out other sources of ink supply, but I didn't bite. If HP isn't interested, then I would be pouring more good money into vanity and simply delaying the moment when the supply of suitable ink (if non-HP sourced stuff is even genuine), from wherever, ceases.

I stopped running the obligatory 24hr power supply and let the machine gather dust.

Now and then, in between cursing HP, I get the desire to print something. But - you know what? - I no longer bother. I have a few boxes full of stuff that I like and realise that continuing along this line with a new printer/ink system is just an ego trip and nobody in the world that follows me after I'm gone will give a damn. And I don't blame them: apart fom some personal photographs of loved ones, what's the point of boxes and boxes of somebody else's fancies? There ain't one.

Even the traditional 'family snaps' thing is pointless. Like most families, I hold on to a biscuit tin of stuff from before I was even born, but it means zero to me. It still exists out of what might well be a totally misplaced sense of obligation, and nothing more. Two or three snaps of a lost loved one is all that's needed to ring the bell.

Generally speaking, unless there exists a commercial market for one's prints, then why bother? Your HD will show you all you've got worth showing so far, and looking back can be a curse, as I know too well, all by myself.

Indeed, printing can be fun, especially during the learning period, which may or may not go on for ever. But as with shooting, once you know how to get what you want, it takes something special to make you go out and do it. Otherwise, you are but a robot without an off switch. Therapy is one good reason to continue, but pray to God you don't discover the need.

Rob C

Although I have a similar experience to you with my dust-breeding printer, I find the rest of your post rather too negative, possibly even indicative of a bit of depression, certainly as regards your hobby! 

[tnargs]

Even the 27inch Mac 5k retina screen only has 14.75 million pixels, so why do we need sensors with 2 and 3 times the number of pixels?  OK, it allows cropping, but do we really need that when it is possible to create large files by taking 2 or 3 overlapping images and stitching?

Although 4K is still germinant, TV tech is already giving birth to 8K, that's 32 MP per frame (and 8000 pixels wide compared to 8700 wide in the new Canon 5DS) -- and it won't be the end (although it should be -- that's a different discussion).

So, I'm more concerned about how my 16 MP files are going to look when the kids throw them up on a 100-inch 8K ultra-high-dynamic TV screen! 

[Rob C]

Although I have a similar experience to you with my dust-breeding printer, I find the rest of your post rather too negative, possibly even indicative of a bit of depression, certainly as regards your hobby! 

Oh - that surprises me! Why is telling it like one finds it negative?

Anyway, hobby, profession - all part of the same thing: some people just live photography and, for better or worse, it's where I find myself and, to risk a tautology, it isn't about playing, it's a way of life.

;-)

Rob

[JohnBrew]

I suppose some might find Rob's post a bit negative, but what he has said is the the sad truth of the matter. Especially for those of us gathering a few more wrinkles around the face and neck than we are used to seeing in the mirror. I still use a Canon 6400 and Epson 3880, but less and less as time goes by. I will always at least have some type of decent printer but when the Canon croaks that's it for the larger format (and my wife will absolutely love it when that beast leaves so she can redecorate!).
I do enjoy printing images, but these days they are more for friends and the only occasional customer and I am no longer printing for galleries as that whole dynamic seems to have gone away overnight and is more of a hassle than anything rewarding, either monetarily or personally.

[Rhossydd]

Back in pre-history, some years ago, I remember Michael writing articles on this site about new printers and new papers.  I do not seem to see him writing such articles now.

I think that this isn't because of a change in the amount people print, just there's less to write about as the market has matured and there are fewer product releases of significance.

[Rob C]

Hi,

Like John writes, wrinkles do producer a somewhat different way of looking at the world, if not simply the mirror.

I think what might happen is that one's own sense of reality becomes moderated by, well, reality: you look backwards and consult experience, and learn to recognize potential traps that just hurt your foot and deliver you nothing but the sense of relief when you escape! Now, that's not to say that experience saves you every time; far from it. In my own case I realised long ago that there are mistakes that I shall continue to make, over and over again, not because I'm particularly stupid, but because some things can't fail to lighten up my imagination and, in the end, to travel hopefully is often the best part of the journey.

Somehow, filling the coffers of companies that desert you without giving a fig doesn't fit that description for me. Have a good day, HP.

Keith goes on to say that he feels the print is the final expression. Well, in many ways I guess that it is; for years it was pretty much all that I handed over to clients. I even went on to make prints on larger papers than the images required - I felt it looked better and raised the job closer to an artform than a simple commercial exchange of benefits, and best of all, I felt good about it! And as long as I did the printing, I was happy. Where it fell a little bit apart was in giant prints which I had to farm out.

Trannies, on the other hand, provided a sense of freedom to me: shoot, edit, submit and bill! Until calendars came along, and all the added responsibility of learning how that printing industry worked, the pitfalls, the ways printers would try to convince you they were right when they were visibly not so, and like that. But, it paid a lot better than just shooting and gave access to far more exciting work for me. But, and a big but, the creative reward part, for me, lay - and still largely does - in the shooting: the seeing and catching it. Once the model signed off and there was just the empty studio or the flight back home, it felt rather a bit flat. Time for a cigarette, no doubt.

So, when the pro ends and the am takes over, how to adapt? Not so easy, least of all because of the need/desire to find a self-motivated reason to do the shooting in the first place. It took me years to get it into my mind that carting the kitchen sink around wasn't going to cut it; it didn't depend on being ready to conquer every possible mountain at all. It depended on being in that rare mental state when you can truly forget what's going down beside you and just look.

You can do that with one body and one lens. In many ways, printing or not makes little difference to me, which is not to deny that I feel pissed off now, being denied the choice.

Rob C

[HSakols]

Well I just fired up my Epson 3880 after it lay in the basement of my house all summer.  I'm happy to say it is up and running like a gem.  Why do I print?  Because I want to learn to make fine art prints.  I'm learning that there is an art to printing which is different from saving the file as sRGB and posting it on the web.  I will spend the fall and winter making small test prints that I store in boxes and then in the spring I will print my favorites larger and then store them in boxes. I once watched a documentary of photographer Bill Cunningham and noticed he had many boxes of prints.  It was interesting watching him go through them in the film.  There is something so tangible about handing a print.

[GrahamBy]

Pre-amble: I've never been a pro, and I have never really aspired to be... nothing against it, just there were other things that made me money and kept me fulfilled. Photography was never anything but a hobby.

There was certainly a time when prints were all there was: I used to make them and stick them to my office door. People would occasionally say nice things about them, which made me feel good. And of course in the 80's that was the only way I got to see my photos at all :-)

Then I moved, lost my darkroom, bought a neg scanner and an inkjet. So I could still make prints, and they made me feel good... even if my printer of the time was not so great for B&W, I turned out a few A3+ colour prints that still make me smile when I pull them out of the box. But there was the problem... they were in a box. Whereas it was much easier for people to see my photos via the internet... photo.net started up, I had my little online gallery and I got to learn all about bitchy comments and cropping advice... but I also got to "meet" some excellent photographers, some doing very different things to me but with whom there was a shared appreciation of style.

So online presentation did more to make me feel good than prints... even though I liked looking at the prints.

Since then, I've moved again, I changed operating systems, I came back much more to B&W, and my old printer sat unloved. Then I bought a Pixma pro-100, because I wanted to look at prints again, and it does beautiful B&W, and it was very cheap and doesn't need to be cleaned every day... and I've barely used it. My friends see my photos on 500px, or Tumblr or Fessebouc, and I see theirs, and we feel a sense of community that way. I find the idea of printing is now much more interesting than actually doing it. If I was selling prints, that would be different. One of my friends does extraordinary work which deserves to sell, maybe my printer will get some work making prints for her to hang in coffee shop galleries. That would make me feel good...

So yeah, it's a hobby. Feeling good is the key idea, and prints don't fit in so much. I don't have so much wall space, stuffing them in a box seems kind of a shame, so...

[Dave Millier]

Prints are viewed by reflective light, a quite different experience from bright, backlit tranmissive electronic displays.

Some prefer the punch of tranmissive viewing but I don't.  It's still the print for me and thankfully there still seems to be some sort of market for printers and materials.

One bonus you get with physical prints is that you are also able to present them as you wish.  I find that matting or matting/framing somehow adds something to the image, setting it off and giving it gravitas (even not so great images benefit). 

I also think that there is more satisfaction in seeing a portfolio of images over the single "heroic" image - and well presented prints do that better for me than a slideshow.

But it's all subjective and electronic is in the majority - just want print tech to continue to be available!

[Rob C]

Losing the plumb of posterity for one's photographic work is one thing, but there are worse things we can, and almost certainly will lose: the net experience, knowledge and even, sometimes, understanding of what we have learned in our life-work within the medium. It's almost impossible to save that, have it accessible to other people interested in the medium.

Yes, there are, of course, scores and scores of books about the late greats, but that's not the same thing as having access to people who were there at the time, had personal experiences of the whos, the whys and the whens. It's difficult today to find anyone operating even as relatively recently as the 50s, who can tell others about how it was; it's not enough to look at books, tv programmes: those are almost invariably written and edited by other people.

Perhaps some of the more revealing/interesting comments from photographers happen outwith tv studios. Sarah Moon comes to mind, and some of her off the cuff videos (voice over images - not a sight of the lady herself) where her stream of consciousness is allowed to flow are magnificent from the perspective of understanding the mind of the artist; Avedon did some very interesting interviews in his own studios too, where clearly unscripted, the time and place allow emotion and personality to take over.

Taken from their hands, that gigantic wealth of experience vanishes forever, or as bad, gets subverted by political slant and cant.

Even watching some still-living heros of the 60s, it's hard to take them too seriously; yes, they attain great things, but repeated interviews reveal them to have a small selection of ready-made anecdotes that are digestible for public consumption, and offer little more than that. What's unobtainable is the personal, business stuff, material that tells how contracts came along, why they were won and lost, who messed it up for whom, all of that kind of thing; in essence, the humanity of it all.

In the end, what matters a few personal prints? So much more is going irreversibly down the photographic tubes at the same time.

Rob C

[hjulenissen]

Even the 27inch Mac 5k retina screen only has 14.75 million pixels, so why do we need sensors with 2 and 3 times the number of pixels?  OK, it allows cropping, but do we really need that when it is possible to create large files by taking 2 or 3 overlapping images and stitching? 

The retina screen will have something like 45 million r, g and b subpixels. The 50 MP Canons have 50 million in total of r, g and b sensing sites. In addition, OLPF will cause some loss of resolution.

I don't fear that future display devices won't be able to show more information from ever improving cameras, but I fear that we humans won't be able to appreciate it. And I fear that the industry will prioritize some aspects that are easily "sold", while other aspects will be ignored.

Reading the reviews of Panasonic and LG 65" OLED 4k devices with (supposedly) HDR support as a future software update I am excited about how HDR images may look like when we don't have to do (as much) tonemapping.

-h

[Alan Goldhammer]

Imagine how different Antonioni's "Blow Up" would be today in the middle of the digital age.  That film was all about the print and the hidden things that could be found.  Today it would be a five minute short about pixel peeping.

[Rob C]

Imagine how different Antonioni's "Blow Up" would be today in the middle of the digital age.  That film was all about the print and the hidden things that could be found.  Today it would be a five minute short about pixel peeping.

That's a wonderful idea!

;-)

Rob C

[Josh-H]

Prints are viewed by reflective light, a quite different experience from bright, backlit tranmissive electronic displays.

Some prefer the punch of tranmissive viewing but I don't.  It's still the print for me and thankfully there still seems to be some sort of market for printers and materials.

One bonus you get with physical prints is that you are also able to present them as you wish.  I find that matting or matting/framing somehow adds something to the image, setting it off and giving it gravitas (even not so great images benefit). 

I also think that there is more satisfaction in seeing a portfolio of images over the single "heroic" image - and well presented prints do that better for me than a slideshow.

+1 - It is for me; all about the print.

[hjulenissen]

Prints are viewed by reflective light, a quite different experience from bright, backlit tranmissive electronic displays.

Some prefer the punch of tranmissive viewing but I don't.  It's still the print for me and thankfully there still seems to be some sort of market for printers and materials.
...

If ever "e-ink" displays becomes good (and it seems they have a long way to go), would this change your view?

-h

[Ray]

Paraphrasing a quote from Koudelka (I think), just because everyone has a camera and takes pictures doesn't make them photographers any more than anyone having a pen makes them a writer.

I think this quote needs clarifying. Are you referring to 'professional' photographers and writers, who strive to earn a living out of their activities?

A person who has a camera and takes pictures is a photographer. He might not be a professional photographer. He might not be a good photographer in the opinion of some, but he is nevertheless a photographer according to the broad definition of the word.

Now, it's true that simply having a pen does not make one a writer. One has to actually use the pen, or keyboard, to be a writer. But again, the same principle applies. I'm a writer and photographer, but not a professional writer and photographer, merely an insightful and rational writer and photographer. 

[GrahamBy]

Are you referring to 'professional' photographers and writers, who strive to earn a living out of their activities?

Does it matter? The point is satisfying the demand for photos (or potentially related souvenirs, such as videos) is being met to a greater extent than before by people who are neither professionals nor enthusiasts. So there is less need for professionals in that domain. Similarly, I'd suggest that a greater proportion of the demand for images is being met by screen display, leaving less demand for prints.

[Ray]

Does it matter? The point is satisfying the demand for photos (or potentially related souvenirs, such as videos) is being met to a greater extent than before by people who are neither professionals nor enthusiasts. So there is less need for professionals in that domain. Similarly, I'd suggest that a greater proportion of the demand for images is being met by screen display, leaving less demand for prints.

I guess it doesn't matter from my perspective. I've never bought a print, except from businesses that used to developed my own negatives and slides many years ago. For the past couple of decades I've preferred to make my own prints, or process my photographic files for viewing on HDTV, and in the near future probably on UHDTV.

My ideal viewing  media would be a 100 inch OLED UHDTV, although that wouldn't be quite large enough to display the largest print that's currently on my wall, which is a 4ft x 12ft polyptych. 

[Rob C]

I think this quote needs clarifying. Are you referring to 'professional' photographers and writers, who strive to earn a living out of their activities?

A person who has a camera and takes pictures is a photographer. He might not be a professional photographer. He might not be a good photographer in the opinion of some, but he is nevertheless a photographer according to the broad definition of the word.

Now, it's true that simply having a pen does not make one a writer. One has to actually use the pen, or keyboard, to be a writer. But again, the same principle applies. I'm a writer and photographer, but not a professional writer and photographer, merely an insightful and rational writer and photographer. 

Indeed, except that I don't think you clarified it at all.

You created a distinction between pro and am which is not, I think, Koudelka's point, if he made that one. I, for one, see the distinction between pro and am as something quite different, but I don't feel like entering that piss-pot zone again, so I'll say simply that I think the point being made was one of quality: owning a camera doesn't make you a photographer any more than does clicking one. Making something good with the tools makes you a photographer. As with musos, owning a guitar (as I did for many years of self-delusion) never made me a musician - I never had the ability, only the desire. Fortunately I never had the opportunity to prove it to anyone else other than my one, unfortunate, music teacher and myself!

;-)

Rob C

[Ray]

I'll say simply that I think the point being made was one of quality: owning a camera doesn't make you a photographer any more than does clicking one.
;-)

Rob C

Rob,
I think I clarified the issue quite well, but you have now confused the issue again. No-one would claim that owning a camera makes one more of a photographer than clicking one. However, clicking one, whether one owns it or not, makes one more of a photographer than merely owning one. Okay? 

The other issue is defining what is a good photo. Is it determined by the amount of money it sells for? Is Andreas Gursky's Rhein II, which sold for $4.3 million, an exceptionally good photo because of its high price?

I happen to think that my polyptych of similar size is actually better than Rhein II. But that's just my personal, unbiased opinion.