It took about three weeks to complete the images for the Hálendi book.
You may be wondering what I had to do, other than just put them in a good order and print them? I rarely print all of my work, it would just be far too time intensive for me to do this and I realise when I publish them on the web, they are about 90% of the way there. Or they way I like to look at it - 100% there, but when I come to print them, I’ll notice things that need to be tightened up and the final image will now be 105%. That extra 5% is the ‘excellence’ in what we do - that extra bit of ‘going a little bit further with the work’.
Truth be told, if you care about your photography, it’s something we all do - we agonise over the smaller details.
Proofs are a way of verifying to me that the images are right. But there’s more to it than this. These proofs will be sent to the printer as a hard-copy - to tell them ‘look, this is what we expect to see in the final print’. Sending files on their own is not enough as each offset press has their own custom ‘colour management’ or maybe ‘no colour management’ in place. So the hard-copies are references for them.
But I find that going through the slow progress if printing 100 images is immersive and instructive. Although I had done an initial image selection and sequencing, I still found about 10 images were dropped from the final book and about 5 or 6 images were added in their place. Sequencing was tightened up as I felt there was a broken flow to the work as you walk from one page to another.
Seems I had to print them to find this out. Seems I needed to go through each image tightening up the tones and colour casts to ‘marry’ with each other to notice find it out also. Seems I had to live with the work over several weeks of printing and editing.
And rarely did I find an image just went straight to print. Every one of them needed work done to make them sit on the page. In some instances the image was too dark, too light, too soft, too hard, lacking contrast, requiring contrast reduction.
Printing always teaches me about my deficiencies. The way I interpret transmitted electronic light from a computer monitor is not the same way I look at light reflected off a piece of paper. I seem to ‘see differently’ and I know it is not a unique trait that I have, but one we all have.
So what’s next? Well we’re still about six months away at least from a printed book in my hands. The book artwork has to be finalised and the materials chosen for the book. We’ve had some price quotes through for soft-back and hard-back books. This is always a trade-off as I don’t have a large audience, so a smaller print run is important, and with smaller print runs the costs go up if you want to go hard-back. Quite a bit. So we will see.
Then when we send the final work to the printer, I would like this time to turn up for the actual printing to see it in progress.
I am going to go quiet now on the book. The rest of the process isn’t that interesting for most, so it’s time for me to talk about other things on this blog.