I am massively enjoying making these prints of my black-and-white Polder project. I also like printing in the darkroom but never got to do it.
Before the black-and-white project, I have always photographed in color for no other reason than to limit my options. For more than ten years, I shot with little direction. Consequently, my work is all over the place. I have always liked this, and still do. I do not like to put any boundaries on my work a priori, but at the same time, I wanted to create a more consistent piece of work.
Looking for a more intentional, focused project, I began to analyze the pictures from the past decade and stumbled on my polder landscape pictures. I like a couple of them, but I found for a larger work, the dominating green color became problematic. So, I tried to convert a couple to black-and-white, and I liked the result. So I crawled through my archive and surfaced about 200 acceptable images, which I further edited down to some 40 pictures.
When converting to black and white, you find that some pictures do not work in black and white. B&W needs more rest. Where color may divide a picture into spaces, after converting it into black and white, the result may be a headache of grey tones and forms.
Color pictures, I think, have a closer relation to reality, opening a broader palette to distort that reality and create an interesting image. On the other hand, Black and white pictures can have a more poetic, sometimes dreamy effect. Black and white pictures, I think, need more space and benefit more from careful design-like composition (though I am not a fan of the word composition in photography). That is probably also why snapshot-type pictures work best in color.
Anyway, I searched for some nice papers (a rabbit hole in itself), and a friend advised me to use Canson Baryta Photographique II or RAG Photograpique Matte. Never mind the name. The first is a fine art luster-type paper, and the second is a high-grade matte paper. I started with the Baryta and liked it so much I have not even tried the RAG/Matte. By the way, I am printing on an Epson p600, a good entry-level pro photo printer with good ink.
Here are some results. Needless to say, taking (iPhone) pictures of photo prints does not serve them as it should.
