Evening Tufa, Mono Lake, CA

This is my favourite image from the exhibition submission. The original negative is a large format (5″ x 4″) colour negative made with a wooden view camera on a trip to the USA some years ago. It is “quite nice” printed straight using conventional “wet” darkroom techniques but it really shines in the “digital darkroom”. In the above print, which is around A3 in size, various parts of the image (rocks, sky, foreground) have been independently tweaked to bring out their particular characteristics. The result is true to my original feelings about the scene, I hope without looking unnatural. Of course, any picture of Mono Lake is bound to look a little surreal.

The print was made on an Epson 1160 printer using standard Epson ink and standard Epson Photo Paper. This is not the most archival combination in the world, but the glossy paper surface enhances both the smoothness of the water and the detail in the rocks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Scotland License. Please credit Ian A. Young, and for web use please include a link to this page, or to https://iay.org.uk/.