On Wednesday 4 March we were delighted to welcome Mark Buckley-Sharp ARPS CPAGB HonPAGB and Judy Buckley-Sharp LRPS CPAGB APAGB with their illustrated workshop discussion – “Our Journey in Printing”.
In the digital world, the printing of photographs has been in decline. Mark and Judy want to encourage printing. And the main purpose of their workshop was to get us talking about printing, both with them and between ourselves.
Mark and Judy are current and/or past holders of numerous positions with NWFed, CACC, PAGB, RPS, the British Computer Society, and the (now ceased) Harrow Camera Club. Mark is a retired Consultant and Senior Lecturer in Chemical Pathology.
Their concern about prints is that prints are no longer the primary output for most people generating photographs. Prints are now “niche”.
During the workshop Mark and Judy talked about the making of prints. And, as examples, they showed us and discussed some of the many prints they have produced over the last 40 years.
They opened with some “trade processed” prints and continued with some of their own chemical and digital prints.
They also talked about mounts for prints (coloured mounts used to be very fashionable “back in the day”) and some of the old darkroom tricks used in chemical printing. Most of these – such as perspective corrections, retouching, and colour corrections – still translate to modern digital post-processing and printing.
With their digital prints they discussed their experiments with composites, colour-popping, pixel “stretching”, tinting, adding text to images, and more.
We also examined the differences between the Adobe RGB and sRGB colour spaces. Mark’s view is that there is very little practical difference. So it is best to keep a straightforward workflow and ensure colour consistency during the shooting, post-processing, and printing stages by using the same colour space throughout (preferably the more widespread sRGB).
The discussion continued with examples of pairs of prints produced in different ways (eg, printed from slides or printed from digital files). This was followed by some consideration of printer profiling and types of paper.
Like nearly all photographers, Mark and Judy now print digitally and they finished the evening with some of their recent prints.
There was plenty of discussion throughout. Mark and Judy of course encouraged everyone to print and pointed out that you don’t have to do it yourself. You can always send your images to a lab for printing. They accepted that there is a cost to printing, compared with “projection”. But there was a useful discussion of ways in which these costs could be minimised (eg, by making images to standard mount sizes and reusing mounts).
This was a fascinating and educational look at Mark and Judy’s extensive photo printing experiences over many years, and all entertainingly delivered. And there was much for us – whether novice or experienced printers – to learn from it.
More of Mark and Judy’s images can be found at https://mjbsharp.me.uk/
