Hey, Boris, welcome back, and thanx for the kind words. And it's
true. I've learned a bunch on this list, and I expect to continue
learning until I keel over into the grave.
What does it take to make a great print? My answer, in a word, is
Passion. Yeah, I know, it's an overblown, overheated, overused and
abused word these days, but I can't find another I like as well. You
capture an image. You find that you want to print it. And you want it
to look like what you remember seeing. More than that, you want the
print to evoke the feeling you had when you saw the image before you
even lifted the camera. It's that evoking that is the tricky part.
<g> I begin working on an image, and I start fiddling with it,
trying to bring back what I saw, or what I thought I saw, and then I
work on this, fiddle with that, mess around here and there, and
before too much time has passed, a print emerges.
The funny thing is that if I let some time go by, I find myself
wanting to fiddle around more with an image. Work it to squeeze out
that last little bit of intangible something that drove me to print
it in the first place. Truth to tell, sometimes when this happens I
have no notion of what I actually saw before lifting the camera. That
vision has been replaced by another vision brought to be by looking
at the print itself. I may be straying far afield here, but, hell,
this ain't journalism, right?
Needless to say, this can go on forever. Dog chasing its tail, that
sort of thing.
For me, technical knowledge is secondary to passion. Yes, it is
necessary to have some knowledge of what you're doing when you open
Photoshop and go to work. It helps to have an idea of how your
printer works. But it's not everything. You can't wait to know it all
before you dive in a start chasing your bliss. I think I was doing
okay never having heard, for example, of Limited Contrast
Enhancement, or LCE. (I think that's what it stands for.) If you'd
told me to hit an image with Unsharp Mask, Amount 20% , Radius 50,
and Threshold 0, I would have called for the paramedics. Would have
made no sense to me to do that.
And then one day on this list I got Moosed. An image of mine showed
up LCD'd in one of Moose's rollovers, and it was like the whole world
got just a little bit brighter. The old dog learned himself a new trick.
That's why even if I abandon Olympus should the new E-Thingy turn out
to be less than expected, I won't abandon this list. Even if my only
credentials for being here is an old Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 I use for a
loupe. <g>
--Bob
On Jan 30, 2007, at 8:08 AM, Willie Wonka wrote:
> …funny how much stuff you learn about what takes to make a great
> print, when you are a member of a list like this.
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