Tag Archives: Printing

Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Digital Printing

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Digital Printing
Wall and sidewalk of a building advertising “digital printing.”

Digital Printing. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Wall and sidewalk of a building advertising “digital printing.”

Sometimes I wonder what people must think if they happen to notice me making street photographs. Take this image for example. I was walking with some sense of purpose back towards the 4th and Townsend Caltrain station, where I would pick up a train heading back down the peninsula following a morning of photography in San Francisco. In a location where most people are similarly focused on getting from point A to point B, usually with heads down, I suddenly stopped, stepped off the sidewalk… and photographed the wall of a nondescript building.

This photograph may be the urban equivalent of the “intimate landscape” image — I certainly think of photographs like this as being landscapes, and this one zeroes in on a very small area of a subject that folks overlook. Being a photographer who prints digitally, the “digital printing” sign had caught my eye when I passed by here a few hours earlier. Now I saw the soft light on the scene, the weathered quality of the wall, the geometry of the subject, and the relationship between the blue bar at the top and the blue quality of the light on the sidewalk.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

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Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Air and Water

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Air and Water
Signs in downtown San Francisco

Air and Water. San Francisco, California. August 14, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Signs in downtown San Francisco

This is an odd little corner along the edge of a downtown gas station near a freeway off-ramp in San Francisco, photographed early on a morning when some fog was still breaking up over this part of the City.

I suppose it is fair to ask what this photograph is “about.” (Though I often think that a photograph simply “is” rather than being “about.”) The soft yet directional light, slanting in from the right of the frame, is the first thing, but the mass and odd angles of the two towering build boards as another. Three is bit of work-play, too, with the text on some of the signs seeming either random or interesting or perhaps both. Whole words appear painted on the wall, though they make little sense absent the context of other missing words. A small sign announces, “Air and Water.”

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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Questions from Readers (11/28/12)

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(Note: I made a major mistake in one spot in this post, suggesting precisely the opposite of what I meant. I have added a single WORD in bold upper case to correct the error. )

Blog readers occasionally email questions (and comments) to me. I can’t always reply personally to all messages, but occasionally I like to share some answers here, both for those who asked and for others who might have similar questions. Here is the latest edition – including a question about monitor calibration and printing, one about an older Epson 2200, and a request for more information about photographing in Death Valley.

Kent wrote:

“I am hoping you might be able to advise me on a problem. I have been having some difficulty getting my prints to match my computer screen. I have a Canon 5D Mark II, shoot in RAW and use Lightroom to process my photos. I have a IMac LCD screen, about 4 years old. I send my converted JPeg files to Aspen Creek for printing. I have contacted the experts at Aspen
Creek and they suggested monitor calibration software. So I regularly use Eye One monitor calibration but that doesn’t seem to help. I also work in a darkened room to minimize the ambient light.

Have you had similar problems? Have any ideas? I wonder if a higher end calibrated monitor wouldn’t help.”

This can be a complicated issue, but let me at least offer a few ideas.

I don’t know if this is the issue in your case, but it is important to realize that even a well-calibrated monitor will NOT present an image that looks “the same” as the image that gets printed on paper. There are some fundamental issues that differentiate images that are formed by projecting light from behind (they “glow!”) and images that are formed from ink/pigments, etc. that are illuminated from light that falls onto them. In general, I find that prints will seem to have less contrast and less intense colors, and will usually need to be brighter overall than the monitor might lead you to believe. In my view, a calibrated monitor gives you a consistent point of comparison, but you still need to learn to understand how to predict what your print will look like by comparison to what is on the monitor.

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Video: Michael Adams on “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico”

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As if on cue, right after I posted my “Photographer versus Photoshopper” piece yesterday, in which I mentioned Adam’s “Moonrise…” photograph, I saw this wonderful video interview with Ansel Adams’ son Michael in which he offers a basic description of the extensive post-processing that Adams applied to the original negative to produce the print we know so well.

The interview also reminded me of another topic for the “Photographic Myths and Platitudes” series that I am thinking about, namely the claim that great photographers always carefully compose and consider their subjects before they trip the shutter. Sometimes they do, but quite often it is more a matter of “tripping” over the tripod as one scrambles to capture a moment of beauty that appeared unexpectedly and which may disappear any second if you don’t work quickly. Of course, well-developed technical and aesthetic instincts help when it comes to turning such a moment into a photograph.