Fundamentals of Printing

"The camera doesn't matter"...I have probably heard that sentence about 1000 times so far since I have been at CDIA and I am also starting to understand why.  What I am also starting to understand, is that your printing skills are even more important than the equipment you use.  The module I'm currently taking, Printing Fundamentals, is the most frustrating class I think I have ever taken, and yes, that includes all of my Economics and Econometrics courses from college.  At least there were formulas to help me make sense of that stuff.  Printing is definitely a challenging aspect of this art and like Economics, it is like learning another language.  Being the perfectionist that I am, trying to finding the perfect combination of brightness, white points, black points, contrast, etc. has wasted quite a bit of ink and paper so far.  The good thing, however, is that all of my experiments are really helping me to become a better printer and I'm finally starting to see improvement.

(sometimes when color is too flat, going b&w can have some amazing results - boston)