Printing the Image - Death Valley

Ann and I spent part of New Year’s day printing photographs.  We printed some images for friends, and also were testing a new program we’ve acquired to work on our images.  Most importantly, we took the time to work on a couple of images from our recent trip to Death Valley, which leads us to this installment of Printing the Image.  

Ann’s image is from Eureka Dunes.  She took it during that period when I hiked back to Beast to bring her closer to where we were photographing.  Instead of the main, very large dune, it looks towards the smaller dunes, southward. As Ann explained to me, it was an area where the ground began to undulate, as opposed to the fairly flat areas where we’d photographed earlier that morning. 

The image is visually very strong with deep tones arising from cloud shadows on the dark background mountains, the rising and intensifying sun, and from Ann’s treatment of the image.  It reminds me of some of Ansel Adam’s more aggressive treatments in printing where he felt it necessary to deepen areas to convey the emotions he felt when he made the image.  (See his Monolith, Face of Half Dome; the sky of Moonrise, Hernandez; or the sky in Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake).  The print not only draws you into the scene, the foreground bush and textured sand are simply mesmerizing.

The image I selected is from the Ibex Dunes.  It was a detail of a dune that I had made several photographs of (you can actually see the detail in the Death Valley blog post), and had left as a subject to make photographs in other directions.  It wasn’t until I was packing my backpack up to move to a new location that I looked over and noticed the detail in isolation and knew I had to figure out a way to exclude everything else from the image. 

It is a rather contemplative image, very subtle but definite in its tonal gradations.  The 6-inch square that I printed is lovely, but I think I’ll have to print this one much larger.