Are big prints just little prints made bigger?

[Ed Richards]

> I've read that the nominal PVD is 10" because that's where the human eye can resolve the most detail.

The young human eye. As most of us age, that distance moves out and our ability to see detail diminishes unless we put on our reading glasses, but then those shift our relationship to the image.

> This phenomenon may be familiar to people who have done some house painting.

There was a yellow green that looked pastel on the chip and looked like the inside of tropical fruit on the wall - I was not even allowed to rest before being sent to the paint store for replacement paint.:-)

Bruce has identified one of the things that was bothering my about my B&W - the relative contrast seems to change as the print gets larger. I would add that little black areas become big black areas and that sometimes requires opening them up. Some of this would go unnoticed in the darkroom because you would correct it as you looked for the new exposure value. In digital you can do exactly the same thing, only larger, so you see some things that you not otherwise see.

[John_4185]

Ed Richards: The young human eye. As most of us age, that distance moves out and our ability to see detail diminishes [...]

Oh thank God! I thought my arms were getting shorter.

[paulr]

> This phenomenon may be familiar to people who have done some house painting.

the same thing with fabric swatches. a friend of mine makes custom men's shirts ... we were going through his fabric samples, and the first ones that struck me as interesting were ones that had led to his first disasters (i mean learning experiences). in a 2 inch swatch the fabric looked intricate and beautiful. in a full size dress shirt it looked like a cross between an aerial photograph and a clown costume.

[Ole Tjugen]

Once upon a time (when MF was the biggest I shot) I did an experiment.

I printed the same negative in all sizes from 7x10cm up to 30x40cm, trying all the time to make the best print I possibly could at each size.

Guess what: They were all different. Not just the contrast/density; I changed the crop as well! Where the dimensions of the print had increased fourfold, the size of the subject had increased more like threefold. Bigger print, more "air" was my conclusion...

[paulr]

That's a great experiment, Ole.

if i taught photography, i'd try to turn that into an asignment.

ever since i started proofing my work digitally, i've had more time to play with size experiments. i've saved a lot of time and heartache by making laser prints of new negatives at several different sizes. sometimes i'm surprised by which size ends up working best. i've come up with a few theories about it (similar to a lot of the ones already mentioned) but some aspects of it remain mysterious.

one thing i figured out about printing a series that includes different sized prints ... prints that are ajacent to each other typically work best if the objects in them are depicted at the same scale, or at radically different scales. If the scale is different by a little, the prints fight with each other somehow. As an example, say you have two prints next to each other, and each depicts a car that's about 30 feet away. Those cars either need to be very close to the same size, or radically different from each other. If the car is 50 percent or so bigger in one picture, then the pairing is likely to be jarring ... at least to my eyes.

[CXC]

One final point, that I've made before: IMHO when you print larger-than-life, you've crossed over a very significant border. I happen to consider such prints too large, and suffering from what I call the "poster" effect, which involves false agrandizement through size alone, and entering the realm of the unseeable with the naked eye. Becoming another level of magnitude objectified away from reality. This effect is particularly strong with human imagery.

I happily grant the certitude that others find the effects of larger-than-life imagery perfectly suited to their tastes, and describable in more positive terms. But whichever camp you fall into, I claim that when you step over the LTL line, you get a different type of artifact, which looks different, and "means" different.

[paulr]

"I happen to consider such prints too large, and suffering from what I call the "poster" effect ..."

without getting into debates over the current trend of gigantic prints, isn't it safe to say that giant scale art has been around for hundreds of years? I think of some of the wall sized baroque and romantic paintings at places like the Louvre, hanging in galleries where you sometimes need to stand back 30 feet to take the whole thing in. you're right that it's a whole different kind of thing than small work (i rarely print bigger than 12 inches) but it seems to have a pretty long history predating current photo fashions.

[CXC]

PaulR, you are right, it's nothing new in painting/sculpture, but my comments were directed specifically at photography. The vast majority of photo images are smaller than life; I claim to have a different reaction to those relatively few cases where the image is larger than life. And it's fine with me if you want to do it, I just think you should first ponder the potential implications.

By the way I consider Chuck Close to be a painter, esp. with those thumb-print things.

[Chad Jarvis]

And for something completely different...

I only contact print, so I make the choice up front as to what size I want my final print to be: 5x7, 8x10 or 11x14. Thus in my case a big print is not just an enlargement from a little negative. A big print is made from a negative made with a big camera.