The Print and the Process

Book excerpt: The Print and the Process is a book of ideas, thoughts, and techniques about our photographs and the process that leads us to the final image. (To be clear, it is not an instructional book about how to print your images.) In this beautiful book, David duChemin takes the reader behind the scenes on four distinct photographic projects, discussing motivation, image creation, and post-production. The projects he walks the reader through are from Iceland, Kenya, Antarctica, and Venice–and for each he discusses the hows and whys of his own image-making process. Each project begins with a beautiful series of 20-30 final images from that project–this is "the print" section, and it's geared for the reader to really take in those images holistically. Then, duChemin discusses "the process" behind creating those images. In this section, the reader will see the project images again but as thumbnails, and David goes through each one, explaining very thoroughly his process. duChemin does not "pre-visualize" a scene, as Ansel Adams famously discussed. Instead, he feels it. And it's from that feeling that he begins working with the elements in front of him and looking at the choices available to him. As he moves around, including and excluding elements from the frame, the camera and the photographer become collaborators. It's from this struggle that the final image emerges. DuChemin has been making images for over two decades, and this process has changed and evolved during that time. By exploring duChemin's images and reflecting on the process behind them–both behind the camera and in post-processing–the reader learns to pay more attention to their own process, and identify ways in which their process can be further examined and improved in order to take more compelling images.