“Iceland – An Uneasy Calm” by Tim Rudman

Tim Parkin

Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.

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In issue 112 we had an interview with Tim Rudman about his Iceland exhibition and book and promised to have a review of the book in the following issue. Hopefully, you’ll forgive us for being a little late on this but the good news is that it’s worth the wait!

I think Tim will agree with me if I say he’s something of a perfectionist. And when a perfectionist collides with the world of book publishing, there will undoubtedly be a world of pain. You see it’s not easy translating the wonderful qualities of our images into the vagaries of offset printing. Colour photographers have their own problems with CMYK and have to make do with duller versions of their favourite images. Black and white photographers have it a bit better apart from one major problem. Most black and white pictures aren’t just black and white! Tim’s images are a perfect example. His toning methods create a wonderful range of hues from cool blacks to warm mid tones and often with a pink transition to the highlights. The choice that a photographer has is to print in CMYK or in black and white duotone or tritone and add extra colour channels to approximate the toning. Tim went the whole hog and the book uses a quadtone process with three inks for black, mid tone and highlight with an extra ink for the pink transitions. The result? Well, we’ll come back to that. More important is the book as a package.