Inkjet Printing for Photographers

- [Voiceover] Hi, my name is Ben Long and in this course, Inkjet Printing for Photographers, I'm gonna show you how to print because as far as I'm concerned, an image is not finished until it's on paper. Taking a picture is a physical act, moving through the world, seeing, positioning yourself, exploring your subject and its environment, and finally manipulating the camera. It's all very physical and I want the end result to be physical also. I wanna have an actual object that results from my shooting process. You can't be a good photographer without having a sophisticated relationship to light, to tone and color, and if your only experience of manipulating and evaluating color and light is on a computer screen, then you're missing out on working with the true color of the real world.

You only get that from paper and current inkjet printing technology lets you explore printed color with a precision, with a dynamic range, and a permanence that you never had in the chemical darkroom. So printing is not just about creating a physical result, it's about the further exploration of your image, your subject, and most importantly, of life itself. I've got a fairly big monitor, but I've got a bigger printer. On paper I can play with scale in a way that I just can't do on a computer screen and as I scale images up, they become landscapes and environments that I can explore.

As I scale them down, they become these little objects that I can live amongst. Image size can dramatically change my relationship to an image, and I can't get that on a computer screen. Sure, with an electronic image, I can beam it all over the world, but honestly, I don't care. It's not a real picture at that point. It's just more calories that we consume from the media bubble. When I put it on paper, it gains heft and most importantly, when I put it on paper, it just looks better and that's why I print, because I want to see my images at their very best.