Print and the Process

The Print and the Process is a book of ideas, thoughts, and techniques about the photographs we make and how we make them. In it, photographer David duChemin covers four distinct photographic projects -- Iceland, Kenya, Antarctica, and Venice -- and uses these projects as a platform for discussing the hows and whys of his own image-making process. Each project begins with a beautiful series of 20-30 final images from that project, then duChemin discusses the process behind creating those images. DuChemin does not "pre-visualize" a scene, as Ansel Adams famously discussed. Instead, he feels it. And it's from that feeling that he begins working with the elements in front of him and looking at the choices available to him. As he moves around, including and excluding elements from the frame, the camera and the photographer become collaborators. It's from this struggle that the final image emerges. DuChemin has been making images for over two decades, and this process has changed and evolved during that time. By exploring duChemin's images and reflecting on the process behind them -- both behind the camera and in post-processing -- the student learns to pay more attention to their own process, and identify ways in which their process can be further examined and improved in order to take more compelling images.