Jason Kittelberger Photography Blog

As I spend more time sorting through all the negatives and contact sheets from my West Texas road trip, I find myself vacillating between excitement and disappointment. So far, it’s been quite a task to sort through hundreds of images trying to distill what best conveys what I’m trying to say, along with making sure the negatives I choose are of high enough technical quality to achieve the kind of fine prints I want to make.

What I’ve found is that with these images, the contact sheets from the 6×6 negatives are practically worthless. At best they give me a vague idea if the compensation works and if the exposure was actually somewhere in the ballpark. But that’s about it. In my mind, I want the photographs to convey the scale and grandeur and sheer vastness of the landscape that seemed to surround me during the trip. But I can’t tell if a negative conveys that feeling by looking at one of twelve tiny negatives printed on an 8″ x 10″ contact sheet.

So what I’ve started doing with negatives that seem to have potential is printing actual 7″ x 7″ prints on RC paper as proofs. Then I’ve been going through these proof prints and revisiting them over several days before I decide if they deserve a fuller treatment. As I make the proofs, I have been spending a decent amount of time trying to get the print contrast and exposure close to what I envision, and I’ve also been doing some minimal dodging and burning. So the proof prints I’ve been making are relatively representative of what I’m looking to achieve in the final print. But at the same time, I don’t want to spend a lot of time and waste a lot of paper making proof prints. So I’ve tried to limit myself to no more than three sheets of paper per negative.

Needless to say, so far it has been a very time consuming but rewarding process. Below is one of the prints that I’ve been struggling with. Part of me really likes it, and the other part of me says the composition is lacking. I’m sure looking at the tiny image on the computer will present the same problems I’ve found looking at the 6×6 contact prints, but as this image is one I’ve been thinking about a lot, I decided to post it anyway.

To me, the photograph is all about depth and scale. There just seemed to be a vast emptiness before me as I took the picture. The hills and rocks seemed to extend in layers off into the distance, finally disappearing over the horizon. And I think a bigger print does a decent job of capturing that feeling. What seems to bother me though is the sky. As it was on that day it prints almost as pure white, which along with the sharp horizon line, seems to lend a sort of cut-out feel to the entire image.

So I’m not sure how to handle the sky. I’ve tried burning it in a bit but that just turns the sky to an unappealing muddy gray. I’ve even tried printing the negative with the sky totally cropped, making the entire image nothing but the rocky landscape. I find that image interesting in an abstract way, but part of me worries that without the sky there is no context, and the scale and grandeur of the picture disappears and the photograph then becomes an exercise in abstract texture. So I’m not really sure what to think. At this point I plan to distance myself from the image and spend at least a week away from it. Maybe when I revisit it in the future, I’ll see something I didn’t see before and suddenly it will all become clear and I’ll know exactly what to do. I can only hope.