Assembling a printed portfolio was a project that I was provoked into tackling by a long-term photography friend, and it has proved to be one of my most satisfying photography projects of all-time. He challenged me to identify a set of my best images to print out as a curated set that would summarize my photography endeavours over the years. It's taken a year from that initial conversation to bring it to completion, partly because the work it has entailed has had to be fitted around other projects, and partly because of the challenges inherent in selecting a set of representative images - for me anyway, this was a process that needed to be enjoyed – not rushed.
Selecting and printing images
My goal was to select a mix of images that represented different phases in my photography over a span of nearly 50 years, while also aiming for consistently high aesthetic and technical quality. To help with this, I asked a number of friends to review a set of 6x4 prints of a large set of candidate images, nominating those that they would include. Results were surprisingly consistent and provided a useful guide when making a final selection. Some images were definite inclusions right from the start, while deciding on others was more difficult. Despite this blurriness in the boundaries around what to include, for now, I can happily live with the final set as a representation of my photographic journey, acknowledging that I might replace some images in the future, as I hopefully continue to hone my photographic vision and skills.
The portfolio currently comprises three groups of images, ten colour landscape images, ten colour natural history images, and five black and white images. Although taken in a wide variety of locations and using a wide variety of equipment, they share a common thread in their capture of the essence of the scenes that were in front of me. For every one, I can clearly recall the circumstances under which I took them; in effect, they function as a set of visual diary entries that record places and events that are important to me.
Once I had finalised my selection, I laid out each image in its own A3-sized Photoshop print document. I then inserted the target image as a linked object, before adding a border and title. Once complete, each print lay-out was flattened and saved as an uncompressed 16-bit tiff. Images were printed by a commercial company in Hamilton on Ilford Galerie textured cotton rag using an Epson SureColor P9070 printer.
Storage
I chewed over a variety of options for storing the final set of printed images, starting with a standard plastic art portfolio box, which didn't appeal. I eventually decided to build a custom wooden portfolio box. This was an own design and build project, with two of its components fashioned from remnants of wood left over from previous projects. I constructed the outer frame of the box from two short lengths of tanekaha, a native timber, which remained unused from the building of a wood-strip Canadian canoe that I completed nearly 40 years ago. I had saved them for a special project, and this seemed an appropriate final resting place for them. Similarly, the handle for the lid was constructed from a small, carefully-saved scrap left over from the 16 foot length of 8”x2” old-growth oregon from which I constructed the spars for a sailing dinghy that I built in the 1990s. By contrast, the ply used for the top and bottom of the box has no particular claim to fame, being the most suitable hardwood ply that I could find in Christchurch. Once completed, I finished the box with several coats of Danish oil, followed by a coat or two of Briwax. lining the inside of the box with some adhesive-backed black felt, The folk at the printing company made me a protective cover board to go on top of the printed images, complete with an A4-sized recess to hold a brief essay describing the images and their production.
The span...
The oldest print in the portfolio dates from the winter of 1977 or 1978, when as a new forestry graduate I was living in Christchurch. I took the day off on a fine, frosty day and drove over to Lyttelton Harbour with my newly purchased Graphic View monorail and a bundle of 4x5 inch film holders. This was before the days of New Zealand's preoccupation with health and safety rules, and it was possible to walk right around the dry dock where the vintage steam tug, the Lyttelton, was having its hull sand-blasted in preparation for a new coat of anti-fouling paint. I took several photographs using a Graphic Optar 90mm F/6.8, a tiny wide-angle lens with limited coverage. A small amount of fall and tilt was enough to get the foreground (lower-left) in sharp focus. I shot this using one of my last sheets of Agfapan 25 4x5 sheet film, which when developed in Rodinal, delivered gorgeous smooth tonal rendering with virtually no grain. Unfortunately when I went to order another box I was devastated to learn that the Agfa importers were no longer stocking this film — although they would accept a minimum order of 50 boxes! I photographed the original negative using my GFX 100s and an Olympus bellows lens with diffused flash illumination. Subsequent processing was in Photoshop and Nik Silver-Efex.
The most recent landscape image was taken on a family holiday in Kaikōura using my Fujifilm GFX 100s coupled with my Arca-Swiss F-Universalis and a Schneider Digitar 47mm. After a dinner of fish and chips in the grounds of Fyffe House, we all wandered across the road to explore the coastal rocks. On seeing this scene, I raced back to our accommodation to collect my gear, returning to take this flat-stitched, two-image panorama.
Although in one sense I've 'finished' this project, I've been surprised at the flow-on effect that its had, particularly in the expectation that it has created for what I now aim for - this is affecting both my 'seeing' and my taking and processing - I highly recommend the process.
-John
