printing

The benefits of printing your work by Maarten Rots

(Words and photos unless otherwise stated is by Maarten Rots. Maarten is an artist working with photography based out of Amsterdam. In his photographs you can see a sense of abstraction and surrealism found in everyday situations, captured by the camera. He loves printed photography and one of the ways he shares his work is through his self-published quarterly photography magazine March & Rock. Maarten will also give away a copy of of March & Rock. See the end of the article for details)

Digital photography is definitely one of the most important developments in photography of the last decades. One of its few downsides though is the fact that your work often remains virtual, it lives on electricity powered devices only. I have made it a habit to regularly print my photographs and have benefitted from it in several ways. Next to having a hardcopy backup it can be of great help to your process, becoming more aware of your own choices and interests, but also gives you new ways of sharing and presenting your work.

Introduction to Darkroom Film Developing and Printing with Taylan Bagci in Istanbul

While I was in Istanbul teaching my Week-Long Travel Street Photography Workshop with Charlie Kirk, we both attended an Introduction to Darkroom Film with Taylan Bagci. I hope this video can give you some helpful insight into the developing and printing process, if you’ve never done it before. The entire film is quite long at 2 hours, so I’ve chopped it into the relevant sections below:

Part 1: Introduction to Taylan and Darkroom (Beginning to 10:00)

Part 2: Developing the Film (9min:50)

Part 3: Inspecting the Processed Film (1hr:11mins)

Part 4: Printing Preparation (1hr:22mins)

Part 5: Printing the Test Strips (1 hr:55mins)

If you want to learn about darkroom printing in Istanbul, contact Taylan at taylan@taylan.net or check out his website.

Why You Should Print Your Photos

Click to read more — RA-4 processed prints from 4x5 Portra negatives.

Eric’s Note: This article is by Ollie Gapper, a street photographer based in the UK- and now a weekly contributor to the blog. Stay tuned for more of his “Ollie Gapper Thursday” posts!

Over the past few months it’s fair to say I’ve spent a lot of time and money on printing. Though it wasn’t entirely through choice, it’s an element of my university course I absolutely would not change. It’s enlightened me, allowed me to look at my work in a totally different way. Being able to hold an image, move it around in the light, hold it close to my face and scrutinise every inch of it, it feels like its making me a better photographer. Seriously.

I’ve learnt a lot in terms of traditional, darkroom printing, both colour and black and white, and in doing so, I’ve learnt a lot about my film and my photographs.

Ive also been reading through the Ansel Adams technical guide books (The Camera, The Negative and The Print) which has taught me to reverse this method of only ever printing for your negative, it instead teaches you to expose your negative for your print. I shant go into the specifics of the Zone System or anything, as thats not what I want to say in this article.

What I want to say is simple: Print your images.