It has been said that you don’t really have a photograph until you have a print. I’m not sure I completely agree (how many people routinely made prints from slides, for example?) but I do think a carefully-made print is the ultimate expression of a photograph and offers something that you don’t get with a picture on a computer screen. It just feels more real when you hold a print. It feels like you’ve really made something. I don’t get that feeling with my digital photos at all and only a watered-down version of it with scanned film. Unless I make a print, of course. Then it feels real.

Not only that, but there’s the whole issue of seeing what the artist intended. I know what I see on my screen when I’m adjusting the curves on a scan and I know now that it’s close enough to what White House Custom Colour will produce in a print that I don’t sweat it. It should look as intended on a well-calibrated display. But how many viewers on the web are using a well-calibrated display? How many people are seeing muddy shadows where I see subtle tonal gradations? How many people are seeing excessively bright mid-tones and washed-out grays that were supposed to be deep black? How does the grain differ on their cheap LCD vs my old CRT? Online you have absolutely no way to know.

I just got back some 8×10 and 11×14 prints which I’ll be offering in an arts and crafts sale our church is running this Christmas and as good as those photographs looked on my computer screen, the prints blow the pixels out of the water, even though they’re merely digital lightjet reproductions of scans from the original film, the very same scans I viewed on my computer. I can’t begin to describe how much I’d like to see what these would look like done the traditional darkroom way.

Tonight I shall be matting and framing my prints and I have a sneaking suspicion that they’ll be even more imposing in their final, fully presented form. I do know already that I want to make good-quality medium sized prints of a lot more of my work (and maybe larger prints of the better examples) and for now, prints from scans of the negative will suffice.

Yes, online means I can be “seen” by many more people than otherwise would be the case, but they’re getting the cheap reproduction, packaged in a way that’s convenient for wide distribution, not the “real deal” at all; you need the print for that.