Digital imaging has fundamentally changed the way we work as photographers. Digital brings immediacy, flexibility and lowers the on-going cost of creating images: once you own a digital camera, creating thousands of images entails essentially zero incremental cost. For the most part those images live on our hard-drives or somewhere in some cloud. We look at them on our tablets or smartphones, swiping right or left to skim past dozens or hundreds of images in a few minutes. How much thought and consideration can you give to an image you swipe past in a second or two? How easily can you consider your composition, your use of colour or light and shadow when seen for an instant on a 4-inch screen? Printing your work at even modest sizes, holding that print in your hands, allows you to (in fact forces you to) consider your image more thoroughly. You will see things in a printed image that might remain unseen on a smartphone or tablet; you’ll be find yourself asking, “What could I do better?” “How can I improve this image?”
“Printing your work helps you become a better photographer”
Historically, the print has always been the ultimate expression of the photographer’s art. When you print your work, you complete the artistic process by taking control of the final expression of your image. A fine print possesses tactile and aesthetic qualities that you control with decisions in post-processing, image size, paper choice and presentation method. All of these decisions are yours when you print your own work. Consider all the artistic choices you make when you compose and make your image in camera. You choose a shooting position and a point of view. You choose an appropriate aperture, shutter speed and ISO. You choose an appropriate lens and focal length. You control lighting contrast with graduated filters, fill light, reflectors or perhaps you decide to use an HDR approach. Wouldn’t you want to have the same level of control when you create the final expression of your image?
“Printing your work allows you to complete the artistic process by taking control of the final expression of your work”
Admittedly, printing your work involves climbing a learning curve; fortunately, it’s not that steep or long. You will also have to acquire a capable printer, which is not without additional cost. If you are serious about becoming the best photographer you can, once you have a assembled a basic kit, the next purchase you should consider is a printer rather than the latest camera body laden with features you probably aren’t going to use anyway. As for the learning curve, I can help. Head over www.bpsop.com and have a look at my easy two week introduction to printing your work.
