It’s the process..

Fading Memories (from the series: Bad Trip – Sad Trip)

…Mark commented today about the potential impact of reworking the tonal qualities of my series Bad Trip – Sad Trip as being a “nightmare”. He was not aware of how true that statement was! After the realization of what I was going to have to do, it did keep me up most of the night. I had implemented the changes to eliminate the partical image diffusion for about half of the portfolio, when I now realize that I will need to go back and start the process over again. At least the last half of the images that I needed to change, I will only need to make them once!

But this issue has been a good lesson in a number of ways. One, if I want the same tonal image, then as I print the “final” version of an image, I need to put along side the rest of the established portfolio and make sure that it “fits”. What I had allowed myself to do was to let a tonal shift slowly move through the body of work. Placing a freshly printed image next to the previous printed image,  I did not notice any changes. But after placing that image next many images is it apparent that I had let a small tonal shift occur, and it had become accomulative. heck!

Next, unlike my day job with real deadlines and penalities, I do not have a deadline with this project. Nope, none! Wow, that is something different, I can keep working on this until I have it right for me. What a delight and I need to keep that in mind. Mind you I have a tendency to think about the completion of the project rather than enjoying the process itself. The potential print reviews, exhibit juries, meeting with a gallery curator, getting the portfolio into print all do get in the way of the process of exploring the reason for the series.

Last, I thought that I may not have to fine tune every image with regard to the tonality. If I have a good match with my benchmark image, regardless of how I arrived there, I will not have to mess with the image. Turns out that most of the images are going to need to fine tuning. Oh well, I now have two images complete and time to consider the third. The second image has taken me three days, so I hope as I learn more about this process, my skills get better :- )

Best regards, Doug