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shiftingpixelz · 3 years ago

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The Repair Shop - Amateur Photography Magazine Feb 2022.

Peter Dench talks to two post-production experts helping photographers perform in the spotlight.

If you unwrapped a photography book for Christmas or popped along to an exhibition, it was probably the result of a long and delicate daisy-chain of experts that helped put it together: assistants, managers, printers, publishers, curators, editors, sub-editors. While the photographer rightly takes the accolades, what got them there are the teams and individuals sitting behind the curtain making sure they shine in the limelight.

Both seeking a lifestyle change and change of pace from London, Sam moved to the Devon coast to raise a family, Caroline moved to Sussex to raise vegetables and expand her tennis skills. Although hundreds of miles apart, they decided to work closely together and in 2016, established post-production company, Shifting Pixels. “The first time Caroline and I met would’ve been 16 years ago when my now husband Ted went to Iraq with the army. At the time he shot film, concerned about shooting digital in a sandy and heat environment. When he came back, everything obviously needed scanning. I reached out to the Pro Centre [a photography equipment hire company] and asked if they knew anyone who did scanning and was introduced to Caroline who came and did his whole archive,” explains Sam.

Legends

Sam is fast and quick at managing, Caroline excels at technicals, detail and beauty. Together the duo's main job is to get the best digital file they possibly can from an existing digital file, negative, print or even contact sheet. That one file is the blueprint to deliver everything from a screen image, exhibition print, book to billboard. “That’s when you realise you have to have your dust busting and scratches sorted. You might not see it on a print but if it’s on the side of a building you do,” smiles Caroline.

They can never be sure what will arrive with the courier. A recent project was Marilyn Stafford’s 228 page tome, A Life in Photography (Bluecoat Press 2021). The challenges were immense. “We had scans from the 1970s, negatives that had been stored in a box, drum scans of original prints and flatbed scans of contact sheets. All are in the book, to make it look like it came from one photographer is one challenge, to make it cohesive so it prints well is another level,” reveals Caroline.

The task of restoring Marilyn’s archive began in March 2021, thinking it would take a month, the pictures just kept coming, the task eventually completed in October. First they did a round of cleaning, spotting one negative took anything up to six hours. “You can’t just bang on a dust filter, if you apply that over the whole image it will soften the image and ruin it. There were a few files that we couldn’t recover and that’s because they had massive chemical Bluuurrrggghhhh!! on them, they were mostly contact sheets that had been scanned badly. It would’ve taken a week to have it fixed,” says Caroline. Some of Marilyn's contact sheets are published in the book. One from a Paris Ghetto was poorly stored, torn and greasy with thumb prints. Caroline put on some music and got to work, restoring it as you would lovingly sew up a ripped vintage dress or sentimental soft toy. It now looks like a piece of art.

The morning after I interviewed Sam and Caroline, photojournalist Tom Stoddart passed away aged 67 after a fight with cancer. Tom was a constant in Caroline’s personal life and career for decades and she is committed to driving forward his legacy. Both Sam and Caroline worked on Tom’s last book, Extraordinary Women: Images of Courage, Endurance and Defiance, with a foreword by actor, filmmaker and campaigner, Angelina Jolie (ACC Art Book 2020). “I knew the work intrinsically well, we had to marry up original scans I would’ve done in 2004/5 to digital images shot in 2017 and some incidental images that I hadn’t seen before,” informs Caroline.

In addition, the publisher wanted the look and feel of Extraordinary Women, published in Belgium to match Tom’s 2004 opus, iWitness (Trolley Books) published in the UK. “Different light, different countries, different cameras, different film, digital, over 50 years of Tom’s work - it didn’t matter because each frame was bang on. Technically, if the photographer gets a great picture, it’s pretty easy for us to do our work. It was relatively simple to bring them in line so we had a consistently beautiful tonal range to hand over to the printer or pre-press house,” she adds.

The default files Sam and Caroline produce are Grayscale or RGB. While they can work in CMYK, conversions for publishing takes a great deal of understanding in how the colour translates from the photographer’s files to the printer CMYK files. “You have the profile for the paper and for the inks. An RGB is three channels CMYK is four, what you're doing is introducing black ink, that’s why everything crashes on print. Introducing black, everything goes flat, you lose contrast. From experience you know what’s going to happen. When you change the profile from Grayscale or RGB to CMYK, you won’t necessarily see it on screen unless you know to look for it. It’s a waste of time creating a CMYK profile unless you know the profile of the printers and papers it will be used with,” explains Sam.

Sam and Caroline often work with the caution of Bletchley Park employees. “Some photographers are reluctant to admit to the work that is done on their files because they haven't got the exposure right in the first place and they don’t want to look incompetent. But if you think of film a long time ago, you didn’t get every shot right - the light was changing quickly, you had to go ahead and shoot. There’s a vulnerability photographers feel with their film work thinking they’re not technically a good photographer. It’s a different way of looking at images now,” says Sam.

Shifting Pixels have collaborated with myriad award winning photographers to find solutions including Zed Nelson, Lyndsey Addario, John Downing and Alys Tomlinson whose 16 bit scans were so big, new computers and software had to be invested in. “I loved Alys’s project, Ex Voto and the connection with her portrait sitters. Caroline is much more interested in the background story of imagery, I’m drawn to images that just connect. I’m a bit more literal. We’d never met Alys before, she’d shot the project on 5x4 and we hadn’t worked on 5x4 for a long long time, when we got the images I literally stopped in my tracks they were so stunning. We cleaned and sent off the files and didn't think anything about it. Next thing we know is it won her Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Awards,” enthuses Sam.

#photography #postproduction #blackandwhitephotography #bookpublishing #imagerestoration #legendsofphotography #gettyimages #reportage #photojournalism #amateurphotograper #ap magazine

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