Digital Darkroom or Fine Art Printing for Dummies

I picked up my new wide format printer last week and I have jumped into the world of fine art printing.  I purchased a canon 24 inch 12 ink imagePROGRAF 6350 photo printer because I really felt I had reached the limit of what my older Epson could do.  I spend months poring over reviews and specs  ( Specs ) on the internet, and finally decided on this printer for several reasons.
The first reason was the absence of any hate posts in the newsgroups.  This struck me as a curious thing because it seems that 20% of all people absolutely hate a product and go out of their way to flame it, 20% that absolutely love a product and it can do no wrong, and these two groups normally represent 80% of the posts to most newsgroups and forums.  I normally filter these out and look for the 20% that are posted by people who really want to provide feedback to other people.  Almost every post I reviewed was looking for refinements.  There were no blazing discussions cataloging a laundry list of issues like there were about the two epson printers I was considering, and reviews were universally strong. 

Canon ipf6350

The second reason was the size of the ink cartridges.  In my epson printer, I had to change a print cartridge everytime I looked at the printer.  In an average session printing I would invariably have one or more cartridges run out and spoil several prints with color shifts.  The cartridges are big and a full week of printing hasn’t even put a dent in the in levels.
Its interesting to see how polarizing technology can be.  There seems to almost be a relgious fevor to the various camps in photography.  Put a dozen canon photographers in a room with a dozen nikon  photographers, and there are sure to be fireworks as the canon missionaries try to convert the the nikon missionaries to the true path as the nikon missionaries try to convert the canon missionaries.  I have somehow escaped this level of fevor so far, but suspect it may be contagious without strong counter measures to avoid infection.
It’s another major step forward for me in terms of learning.  The past few years I have been focused on the photography and learning the necessary craft to take good photographs.  This year I have started to learn the craft necessary to make good prints.  I think the digital photographer is at a disadvantage in this process because so much of our work exists on the monitor of a computer.  I have been taking digital images for 12 years, and my image archive is over 50,000 images.  I have printed very few of these in the past, and never focused on the print as the over all reason I take photographs.
Had I started photography 25 years ago, I would have been deeply focused on the print as the whole reason for the process of taking the photograph.  Without this grounding in the chemical darkroom basics I am finding that it is much harder than I suspected to produce an outstanding print.   The simple days of producing snapshot quality prints on Gloss, Semigloss or matte Epson paper are over.  This new printer takes my printing to a whole new level.
It starts with the size.  This printer is Big, the paper is Big.  It doesn’t sound like a hard thing to do but I’ve never visualized what a print would look like bigger than 11×17.  I could never print it, so I never thought much about it.  I’m finding that some prints lose context and don’t work if printed too large.   Other prints really call for the scope and scale that a large print allows.  I printed my first panoroma of the Alaska Moutain Range at dawn over four feet long, and for the first time was able to view this photograph in the appropriate scale.  It looks better than I visualized.
The next challenge is the choice of papers.  The days of three types of paper are over.  There are a bewildering variety of papers, with an amazingly variety of finishes and properties.  To make decsions harder, I now have a choice of canvas, and other fabrics.  Visualizing the image as it moves on to these papers is going to take much trial and error to get it right.  I have found already that careful pairing of media and photo can greatly enhance  the final print.
A perfect example is an photo that has a fringe of ice around a rock in a stream with sunlight bouncing through the ice and water.  Printed on gloss photo paper, this is a good photograph.  Printed on a metalic paper, this is an outstanding photograph, because the metalic finish causes the areas there were lit with internal sunlight to glow as if lit from within, and breaths life into the print.
I have much to learn about the craft still.  I had to call my photo mentor last week and ask “I keep reading about using cotton gloves to handle paper as you load it and finished prints, in the instruction manual.  Surely no one really uses them?”  There was an icey silence on the line for a moment, then “Of course I use them.  I have always used them since I had a darkroom.”  When I visited I saw white cotton gloves next to her printer and she even gave me a bag of them to start me out, and a quick lesson the tricks to keep them on as they stretch out.
It will be fun to see where this new challege takes me.  Already shooting photos this last week I find myself not just visualizing the photo and what it look like on the computer, but taking the next step and considering what I expect the finshed photograph to look like.