Reading Response: Chapter 3

                    The beginning of chapter 3 on light had me initially worried. On the first page, there was a diagram of the light spectrum. Not being a science-oriented person, I was prepared to fumble through the reading, knowing I would probably have to re-read many sections and that I still wouldn’t get all the information I needed out of the reading. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when the reading touched upon something that I am extremely familiar with and actually deal with on a regular basis. 

                    For the last 3+ years, I have worked in a Staples Copy & Print Center. Although most of my print knowledge stems around business digital printing, we do also print wide format color prints (ie: photos, banners, posters, etc). So I greatly appreciated the part of the reading where it talked about resolution of an image and the authors stated, “Resolution measures the fineness of an image, but resolution goes down when size goes up” (London, 53). My coworkers and I constantly struggle with getting people to understand this concept of resolution. Very often what I experience is customers coming to me with a picture they took on their smart phone that they love and want to make into a large poster. With apps like Instagram, everyone with a camera phone thinks they know all there is to know about being a great photographer. No matter how hard you try to explain to a customer that their tiny Instagram photo will look pixelated as a 2’x3’ poster, most people think they know better and say to go ahead with the order anyway. Then it is often a nightmare trying to deal with an irate customer who doesn’t know why we did such an awful job and that their print looks like a bunch of squares all over the page.

                  Because of some of the printing background that I already have, I believe it’s important for people studying photography to remember that what they see on the screen of their camera will not transfer perfectly onto a printed page. There are so many factors to be accounted for and  that to be a good photographer, you also need to study printing and know how to troubleshoot when things go wrong (which they almost always will!). ​