Printing the Image - 2018.03.18 - Morning, Snow Canyon
This week’s print comes from our Spring 2017 trip, taken at a location neither of us knew about until the day before we got there - Snow Canyon State Park. It’s another one of Utah’s incredible state parks and if you’re ever in St. Georges on the way to Zion or Brice Canyon, it’s worth a detour, whether for a drive-through, a morning (afternoons get hot!), or a relaxing couple of days away from the crowds of the National parks.
Like the image that started this series, I picked it to see if the paper could handle the quality of light that was present when I made the image. Fortunately it did - quite easily. I applied what I’d learned in my previous printing sessions to increase the contrast range of the image, and to lighten the darker areas so they didn’t block up into an unintelligible dark mass. The incredible thing that morning was how the tops of the plants in the foreground and mid-ground appeared to glow in the pre-dawn light (assisted by light bouncing off of clouds to the east), with the mountain range off in the distance doing the same. I wound up making a second print, because the mountains in the back were a shade dull and the image lost it’s depth, but by the second print the image was spot on.
It was pretty amazing to get a print this nice without too much extra effort from my original developing of the image. And in some ways, it’s odd to see the differences between the image developed for the screen, versus the image on the screen but intended for the print, and then the print itself. In this instance not only did the plants glow in the print as well as on the monitor, but the purples in the bushes off to the right are lovely, giving that corner a presence that gets lost on the screen a bit. And the print has that real sense of depth and spaciousness that I felt that morning.
Interestingly, this was not the destination for the morning. We were on our way to a giant petrified sand dune (you can see another one, reddish, right of center in the image above), but this was one of those moments that you realize is special and you stop to make the image you have in front of you instead of hoping for something better up ahead. While it may sound like an obvious thing to do, the reality is one often has high hopes for the final destination (which we did, and which was also very rewarding) and you forget to be observant on the way there. Once I’m out photographing, I try to always be “on” - looking for images wherever they may arise. This time, I’m glad I was!
Yesterday I also continued to work on my Alabama Hills Image. I darkened the shadows a bit and increased the contrast a bit more. My first print was also on the baryta paper (which I used for the print above) is used for the better print last time, and the image turned out better, but still lacking in something. So I decided to switch to a photographic (resin coated) paper because it’s supposed to be just as contrasty as the baryta to see if it had to do with the paper itself. The two were nearly identical with very subtle differences in how the image “feels”. I have no better word for it because technically, they’re nearly identical. Although slight, on careful examination there are differences with the photo paper having a cooler, brighter base, and the baryta paper appearing a bit yellowish in comparison, but having a sense of depth that isn’t there in the photo paper.
Still, that image looks a bit too light for pre-dawn, so perhaps my next step is to just darken the entire image a bit so it feels like pre-dawn instead of morning. Thing is, I only have two more sheets of baryta paper left. Maybe time to get some more!