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The photographs are printed digitally with the Piezography process using selenium pigmented inks and 100% artist rag paper. The process creates beautiful, long-scaled photographs with translucent highlights and richly detailed shadows. The prints have a wonderful depth, sharpness, and tactile quality that cannot be matched by traditional photographs.
I readily adapted to digital printing because it gave me extraordinary control over tonal values. Great prints are not created just by deep blacks and white whites but by controlling the movement and rhythm of values across the print's surface. That is what makes a print look alive and gives it depth. It is also the most difficult thing to achieve in traditional printing. In digital printing, all the methods of contrast and tone control available in the darkroom are done with a far greater degree of refinement editing on a computer. The relationships between highlights, mid-tones, and shadows can be adjusted as easily within a 1/4" square area of the print as over its entire surface. The photographer's imagination and patience are the only limits to the controls digital printing offers. I will typically spend from one to three days editing and printing a photograph.
Piezography beautifully conveys the transparency of surfaces, depth, and space that are the true subjects of my landscapes. These are unfortunately qualities that cannot be conveyed on a computer monitor. The mussels diptych, for example, elicits enthusiastic responses when viewed as a full-scale print, yet it does not read well on a computer screen. On the screen you see mussel shells, but it is the translucent surfaces the shells float in and out of and the sense of seeing "into" the print's surface that fascinates the viewer.
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