Update On Pepper # 30

Although I discussed the compositional elements and the wonderful shapes, I didn't discuss perhaps the most important part of the image, the wonderful tones. That pepper glows, it's three dimensional. Intererstingly it does this even in cheap mechanical reproductions and on the net. I did once however see a very light version of the image and the rich tones were ruined, it was less than half the image it normally is, yet arguably it was well exposed and showed normal tonality - were it an illustration for a gardening catalogue, it would have been just fine and arguably preferably to Edward's interpretation of the Pepper.

This does raise the question though which every photographer struggles with - just how dark to make a print. In the wet darkroom days it was all too easy to make the whole thing too dark - some of the tones would be rich, but at the sacrifice of others. Ansel went through stages of printing much darker or more contrasty so even with the masters some variation over time is normal and part of the creative process. These days with digital printing, it's easy to nail the dark and light end of things with curves or levels, yet we can dramatically affect the overall brightness of the print by how we interpret the midtones.

Prints that look right at the time you make them sometimes look completely wrong the next day. In the wet darkroom we had issues of dry down and how bright an inspection light to use and such, we still have some of those issues today. Dry down is much less (though with some papers and inks it still happens to some degree) and the quality of the viewing light is a problem.

I once went to a camera club to give a talk and after they had a print competition. They set up two flood lights one on either side of the print and about three feet away and blasted light onto the prints. Any print that was right for that lighting would be hopeless in just about any normal lighting situation from galleries to home.

Some people have never ever seen subtle highlights or rich shadows and literally don't know what they are missing. I highly recommend subscribing to lenswork magazine even if you yourself work in colour. It's superbly printed and is as close to original photographs as you can get with mechanical reproduction.