When our family went digital, we stopped getting prints. That was ten years ago. 🙂 So when I decided to embark on this adventure of providing my photos for print, I had a whole host of new things to adjust to. To begin with my preference in photos tends to lean towards the bold. Sharp, very distinctive lines draw me in every time. The screen naturally accommodates my desire for this and in many cases because of how we view photos on our devices can even enhance this, magically masking errors. 🙂 Who wouldn’t like that?! 😉
Print, not so much. As such I’ve done a lot of grumbling. After ten years of seeing photos only on the screen, I wanted the exact same crispness on paper. No, actually I wanted it better then that. People were paying for that photo on paper.
My friend April Alsup, a fellow photographer who is gracious enough to endure my endless questions 😉 once told me that I needed to relax. And then I needed to allow the photos to relax. “Prints are a softer, more magical depiction of the captured memory. As such, let them be.”
Does this mean I shouldn’t strive for those crisp lines that I love so much? Absolutely not. Every photo I take I’m trying to learn how to get that better ‘in camera’ because this will ultimately give me that magic on paper as well.
But what it does is remind me that not everything has to be so absolute to be right, to be a good photo. It reminds me that sometimes the magic is in the softness, in the soft lines.
