Joseph Holmes - Master of colour photography

I first came across Joseph Holmes’ work a couple of years ago and was instantly struck by the fantastic quality of the images.  Joseph lives in California and has been photographing wild landscapes for thirty-eight years and during that time he has been pursuing the ultimate colour photographic printmaking process.

Joseph uses a 5x4 inch camera system and a variety of colour films to capture the stunning colours of nature. Once the film has bee carefully processed, he selects the best shots and scans the film on a high quality drum scanner. Joseph devotes over twenty hours to the scanning and processing of each image, before reaching the point where he is ready to make a file that will be used to make the first print. He will continue to fine-tune and make adjustments to the image until he can no longer find any way to improve upon it.  Joseph, a master of colour management, explains, “Only with successful colour management can the precious fruits of digital imaging be realized. Creative control is what most art is all about, and colour management makes the ultimate form of creative control for colour photography possible.”

Joseph is using a digital DSLR camera for some of his more recent work. He stitches several frames from a Canon 5D camera. Capturing images directly has the advantage of greater colour precision and white point flexibility, whilst capturing even more detail. The image "Aspens, eastern Sierra, California"  is a good example- Joseph stitched 12 frames to produce a final file size of about 70 MegaPixel's.

© Joseph Holmes - Aspens, eastern Sierra, California  2006

Joseph comments "It's a better picture and exciting because of the new look and feel that's now possible.  A big print is really something.  You could see an ant on the tree trunks if there were any (not in a print but on the screen).  I mean the print would have to be ten feet long.  It's maybe like combining two or three 4x5 frames side by side.  I am especially taken by the colour quality, partly because the light source was deep blue sky and there is no trace of that fact in the image"

Thanks to digital imaging Joseph believes that colour photography now surpasses the very broad tonal adjustment capabilities of traditional, chemical black & white photography first demonstrated by Ansel Adams. 

He says, “Achieving control in colour photography is profoundly more demanding in a fundamental sense than achieving control in black & white, because the problems are more multidimensional. Traditional, chemical-only colour photography is inherently incapable of addressing the challenge of rendering a very wide range of subject matter with superb quality, let alone with expressive control which allows for a wide range of artistic interpretations.”

For printing, Joseph uses Epson Premium Luster (250) paper, with an EPSON 9800 wide-format printer or two. "The latest changes, seen in the new UltraChrome K3 inkset are extremely gratifying, with superb blacks and nearly perfect surface reflectance characteristics. This new inkset and its associated driver technology will also allow me to finally begin printing my favourite black & white images again".

It’s one thing being a master of a technically perfect print, but when you combine technical perfection with a creative vision then you have the name Joseph Holmes.

You can see more of Joseph Holmes' work and read more about his meticulous techniques on his web site, www.josephholmes.com and if your over-awed by the sheer quality then you can always invest in an original Holmes print.

Click on the image below to enter Joseph Holmes' gallery (slide show is a Flash gallery - 3mb)

© Joseph Holmes - Storm surf, Monterey County, California 2003

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