In the “old days” – that’s to say before some time around 2001 when I bought my first scanner – I was quite a good black and white printer. I had to be because my negatives were so bad. Developing in makeshift darkrooms – bathrooms, kitchens – where maintaining consistent temperatures was impossible, made for inconsistent negatives. The problem was that I still preferred my bad negs to the ones I got back from the (expensive) labs I tried to use from time to time. I learned to compensate for the negatives’ shortcomings in the printing, often working through the night (it was far easier to keep the darkroom dark at night) on just one image.
The idea was simply that the picture I wanted was hidden somewhere in the potential of the negative: if I worked on my technique and was stubborn enough, I would eventually be able to coax it out onto the printing paper. What that potential image might be, only I could know. Every attempt I made to have someone else print my pictures became an expensive failure for this reason. It was obvious that no one would be more motivated than I to get the best out of my negatives. This logic is how you end up doing all  your own printing.

Story. There was a French lady photographer I admired very much. In one of her (to my eyes) beautiful books she credited her printer his laboratory. When an advertising agency I was working with said they had a contract with that printer and that lab, I was delighted to be “forced” to work with him. Until, that is, as I returned for the third time the mediocre print he had made for me, I was told that he simply couldn’t afford to spend the time required to get the result I wanted. I would be better off scanning the negative and doing the Photoshop work myself. Which is what I have done ever since (except that the scanning, happily, is now a thing of the past).

With digital, little has changed. From time to time, clients will ask why I can’t just deliver files out of the camera. After all, digital is supposed to be fast and they don’t re-work their own snapshots…
The answer is simple: the files, as they come out of the camera – at least any camera I have owned – are simply not finished. For me they are like negatives, the starting point from which I will create the finished image. On any job I do each photograph is opened individually and corrected. Sometimes just a little, other times massively. Always something. It’s the only way I know to maintain quality. My life would be far easier if I didn’t have to do this but it just goes with the territory.
This picture was taken in Brittany. I was on holiday and from the diningroom table could look out every day onto the beach. I had the idea of this picture in my head for a long time and one day all the elements – the clouds, an agitated sea, a lone swimmer – came together. But that was, literaly, only half the picture. I then, just as with a negative in those “old days” needed to coax the photograph I had in mind out from the original raw file (from a Ricoh GX100). In this case it was done by processing the original in Lightroom, doing additional work in Photoshop and then returning a TIFF file back to Lightroom for final tweaking. This “round-tripping”, Lightroom – Photoshop – Lightroom is something I do quite a lot. I find that it’s easier to ensure image-to-image consistency in a large batch of work when I do the final export from Lightroom.
Why show you this picture in particular? Because the difference between the original and the finished image is so great that it illustrates clearly what I’m talking about. And, simply, because it is an image I am particularly fond of.
On the same topic, the Italian laboratory 10B that has put together some interesting pages here.

The unretouched version -