I hate printing my photographs.... There I finally said it. It's true. It seems so simple and easy but the reality of the situation is what looks good on your computer rarely looks good printed.
This is what happens... I take a big ol' bunch of pictures and I select the few that actually managed to go from my head to the little digital point and click. We are not always in total agreement and as a result it often decides not listen to me. It takes a picture focusing on the thing I had no intention of photographing and blurs out the thing I spent time lining up. Of course I realize my non-digital slr camera would not have this issue and would be a better choice but it's expensive to buy film, develop film and have pictures you haven't seen yet developed. As a result I tend to go digital and often times growl at my camera while I attempt to capture my subject appropriately. The other day my camera magically produced an image with nothing in focus... it was unbelievable. The problem was I had actually brought out a tripod.... so it wasn't due to my shaky hand. So I am generally stuck with simple subjects that the camera and I can both see the ideal subject clearly. We make beautiful photos together when I keep it simple (stupid?). Unfortunately, I am not really the ideal point and click guy.... I see great shots that have a little difficulty to them and I work to pull them off. I get excited when they work out and foolishly try to get the camera to understand what I want in an even more difficult shot... I never learn.
So there I am with 300 shots... and perhaps I am lucky and I can use half of them. The problem that arises next is that I tried different angles of a subject and have several shots from those different angles that work. Now I try to identify a couple shots that are superior. Suddenly I am now at a quarter of the original shots and I have to run through again. Nobody likes a 75 picture slide show. Out of those 75 I select around 30 some odd pictures and I clean them up and make them look good on the computer. I produce a slide show and people tell me the shots they liked. Then Christmas rolls around and I think... I have picture frames and a lot of fantastic pictures so I should give photos out this year.
After deciding which prints for whom, I order prints... but the prints come back looking awful. I immediately begin to tinker so I can reorder these prints and the colors are still goofy. I am stuck at that point because I can't really afford to just order more and more prints until I finally get the colors corrected. So I took all these photos and worked on them for hours only to have an issue with the prints. If I had a film camera and a darkroom I could just develop and tinker until it came out the way I dream it should.... but I don't. I have a digital camera and a computer. I could produce images on my own except that the ink cartridges get sucked dry super quickly when you do that and ink cartridges cost a mint. So I am back to printing at the store and waiting.... then tinkering and printing again. This sucks! So if all you got was a card this year.....
Either way it's a new year. 2009. Woo or something.
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