While I can make a decent black and white print I am unable to produce a true museum quality print on my Epson 9890. I recently started a sabbatical to pursue a career as a fine art photographer but my printing skills are lacking and there's only so much I can learn on my own or online... Could someone recommend a master printing workshop, or maybe someone you know that would be willing to teach advanced B&W printing one on one ?
Paul,
How do you define "museum quality"? Are you simply referring to the technical aspects of the process, physical image quality? (How to get the most out of your printer and Photoshop?)
Or do you instead mean the aesthetics? Or both?
There are definitely workshops that will teach you the basics of the mechanical side, but only the basics, from what I've seen. Topics such as calibrating your monitor and making profiles, and of course how to dodge and burn in Photoshop which oddly, you shouldn't do! These are actually things that are easy enough to learn and do on your own. You just need to invest in the hardware and software required. Photoshop is every bit the steep hill it is made out to be, but you need only climb it once and having mastered the tools you need, you will realize that any other pretender to the throne would have been wasted time and money.
The current handful of magic beans seems to be that if you calibrate your monitor and make good profiles for whatever papers you are going to use, life will be beautiful and masterpieces will issue forth from your printer. This is utter nonsense. It is a special class of nonsense when it comes to B&W. If you are seriously making B&W fine art photographs, a calibrated monitor and better than standard paper profile will save you, at most, exactly one sheet of paper in the process of working up a good print. Worthwhile of course, but hardy the golden goose it is made out to be. This is all something akin to telling you that if you put new, carefully balanced tires on your car, you are certain to win at Daytona. And once all that special calibration magic is done, and done perfectly, the print that leaves your printer will STILL not look like what you see on your monitor, despite what everyone says. It simply, ain't that easy!
The odd thing about fine art photography instruction is that it took a hard, sharp turn recently, thanks to the advent of digital photography. A lot (most, by far) of the greats chose to remain with analog materials and therefore can't be of any help to you. And most of those workshops tended strongly toward the technical also. I know that for me, the switch from analog to digital has taken the better part of five years and has been a significantly painful process, but much of the pain was my own fault. I forgot past experience that taught me just how much books on analog photography tended to be wrong and I could have saved myself considerable time had I been more distrusting of books on digital photography. (It seems that the people who know the least are almost always the most driven to write books.)
A lot of those who did make the switchover are still approaching the digital process with an analog mindset. Dodging and burning, trying to make digital materials look like analog materials (a particularly silly endeavor; it makes far more sense to try to coax the best out of digital, rather than simply try to make it look like something else). Putting great effort into getting a 'neutral gray' digital image is particularly pointless since neutral gray was never the holy grail so many people appear to believe it to have been. The ultimate silliness is "how to convert your images to grayscale". Properly approached, a color digital original should never be converted to grayscale, despite the fact that a B&W print is the goal. I am appalled by the number of books on the subject that begin with: "convert your image to grayscale". Such books should immediately be thrown in the trash!
There is one practical thing you can do right away that will make an immediate, noticeable difference230;
You can't get a good enough image out of a 12 megapixel, half frame camera for high end B&W images. And yes, I know, every last "expert" out there will say you can. An image simply won't withstand the kind of manipulation required for the type of extensive work you will most certainly require. Remember that film loses nothing as you manipulate it in the analog process. But a digital image loses information every time you do something to it. With a big image from a large sensor, you have lots you can afford to lose. Smaller images and sensors leave you no elbow room at all. The absolute bare minimum, and this has only been affordable the last five or six years, is 25 megapixels or more on a full frame sensor, NEVER a half frame sensor. If I were buying now, I wouldn't hesitate; the best current option by far is the Nikon 800 (the "e" for me).
The first digital camera I bought was 10 megapixels on a smaller sensor.What a gigantic mistake that was! I was making the transition all at once and was eager to make new images digitally. After a few months I was in a real panic because I simply was not getting anything approaching analog quality out of my digital images and all of my analog equipment had been long sold. I thought it was the printer. I then decided to take a break from the frustration and start scanning my film negatives, making test prints from those scans. My image quality jumped sharply. I realized the printer was just fine, but the Olympus SLR digital camera I had been using was a toy and incapable of providing the image quality I needed.
You are going to see people scream at this post and swear I don't know what I am talking about. Their small sensor, low megapixel cameras provide great images, they'll say. You'll have to decide for yourself, but there is one tool you can take advantage of to discover the difference on your own. There are a number of web sites that will allow you to download a sample RAW file made with a camera that interests you. Download a RAW file made with the Nikon 800 (remember, it MUST be RAW: processed files such as jpegs throw away almost everything before you ever see them) process and print it. I did this with a Sony a900 RAW image when I realized it was the Olympus that was making me crazy. The Sony file immediately showed me that I had the wrong camera for serious work. Now, getting a camera that is up to the job won't help you make fine art photographs, but it will make it a possibility. A small sensor, low megapixel camera simply makes it impossible.
David Kachel
___________________
Artist-Photographer
Fine B&W Photographs
www.davidkachel.com
david@...
Gallery:
www.reddoorfinephotographs.com
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PO Box 1893
Alpine, TX 79831
(432) 386-5787