Digital Printing: Posing Productions
7th Apr 2009
Travel back in time just a couple of years and ask any self respecting photographer what they thought of the cometh of the digital revolution. You’d usually hear a resounding denial that it would happen in their lifetime. Ask them again now and there tends to be a shuffling of feet and an embarrassed pause. Either that or an evangelical approach to the whole affair. Alastair Lee lies somewhere in the middle…
Alastair has long been on the scene as one of the UK’s foremost climber-photographers. His company Posing Productions has churned out the likes of Eyes Up, Forgotten Landscapes, a guidebook to climbing in New Zealand as well as a host of calendars, postcards and prints, oh and some fairly popular films to boot! There’s no doubt about it, Alastair is both a talented photographer and a resourceful publicist. Embracing the digital age like few others he has recently invested in a couple of hefty bits of equipment: a £7,000 Hassleblad virtual drum scanner and a large format £2,500 Epson Printer (Stylus 4800 – variable dot size, eight Ultrachrome inks and lightfast for over 100 years). He doesn’t however use a digital camera (yet!), preferring a £6,500 Roundshot Super 220 VR, with variable exposure whilst the shot is being captured all on medium format film, slides are about 6 X 18cm. In a nutshell digital and even 35mm photography isn’t at the stage where it can be blown up to the sizes Alastair is printing without some loss of quality. Sure you can go down to Jessops or Click with your 6Mp snaps and they will print some massive posters for you, but get up close and you’ll immediately see the blockiness.
Alastair sent planetFear a couple of prints to review, samples from his gallery. We have the following two 37” by 17” (image size 30” by 11”) prints:
What do we think? They’re pretty damned good that’s what we think. They are vibrant. The colour depth is great. There’s no hint of any graininess or pixelation. The paper is a heavy satin finish number. They arrived rolled in tissue paper in a sturdy cardboard tube immune to any poor post office handling. At £20 we think they are a bargain worthy of a decent frame.
Check out the gallery for a range of Mountain and Limited Prints all taken by the man himself.
Watch out for Alastair’s coffee table style book of Lake District Landscapes later this year.