The Sharp Print

For 150 years photographers lusted over sharp prints (exc. the pictorialists of the early 20th century and some portrait photographers who got it in the ear from their (mostly female) clients about wrinkles and face fuzz.

Sharpness is a far more complex subject than we might think at first.

For example, think of a 35 mm. tri-x image, 11X14 - the grain is tack sharp, the image isn't super sharp, but because the grain is, the image is perceived to be sharp.

Someone takes a picture at a football game with a long lens - framing the upper half of a single player. The print is huge and sharp and looks great at 20X24 from a 6 MP camera. Someone else takes the same model of camera and shoots a landscape showing a field of grass receding into the distance. he attempts to make a print half the size and the grass just doesn't look quite right.

It would be tempting to blame this on technique or lenses or various other equipment related issues but the reality is that what's important in the two images is completely different. The sports picture requres sharpness. There are no really fine details. As long as the shirt logo, the outline of the helmet and the eyes appear sharp, the photographer has a winner. What he's actually looking for is good edges - that is clean, well defined junctions between one colour and another, or between a dark and light area. If the picture doesn't resolve the threads of the shirt, it doesn't matter - the image looks sharp.

The poor landscape photographer however needs the grass to look like grass and beyond a certain size, he just can't do it. Better sharpening algorithms help somewhat but mush is mush. It isn't helped when you take into consideration dot gain of the inkjet print (ie. spread of the dye on the paper), the fuzzy filter in the camera (designed to prevent resolving patterns enough to make the bayer algorithm that translates rgb coloured pixels into a full colour image from going wild and creating moire patterns.

Unfortunately we seem to be in an era of customers wanting (and willing to pay for) large images. 24X36 is hardly big enough. It's all very well intending them to inspect such large prints from a distance, but truth is, they get within 8 inches of such prints and squint to check the finest details - so customers are definitly not to be fooled. Various uprezing tricks help to some degree but bottom line is there is a limit to how far you can go from a particular format or film or pixel count.

I'm getting ready for a show in Toronto and they want BIG! prints and recently sent me a list of images. I had already warned them that not all would make 3 foot prints so they asked me for the maximum size each print would go.

Knowing they want big prints, it is really tempting to stretch the maximum size but I know that I'll regret it when it comes time to make the prints and I need to be happy with the images I make. So I sent some pretty realistic sizes for them - I think they are going to be disappointed that their favourites can't make giant prints.

I could of course have shot all these images on 4X5 or larger - but its very clear to me that I wouldn't have - somee required quick setup, others long lenses, others still multiple images to get adequate depth of field or dynamic range, all of which would have been considerably or impossibly harder with film.

Even Christopher Burkett (who shoots lovely landscape images with an 8X10), also uses a medium format camera when in a hurry or when he needs longer lenses. I'm curious though about how he carries all this equipment - I'd be afraid that if I were carrying the 8X10, I'd see nothing but long lens images, or I'd be carrying the medium format camera and see detail images that I would know would have been better suited to the 8X10.

In determining the maxium size of prints for the upcoming show, the subject matter determined the size every bit as much as the pixel count. Tree Reflection (my upside down tree image) makes a lovely 3 foot square image, but others have had to be restricted to 10X15 inches, from the same camera.