When skimming through the slide pages looking for this week’s submission, I came across a couple of different slides of brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis,) which started me thinking. Many years ago, in need of something with which to brand my letterhead and envelopes that said “nature photographer” (other than, you know, the actual words, “nature photographer,”) I settled on a particular pelican image that seemed dynamic yet simple.
Embedded photos don’t reproduce well on most one-color printing systems unless you either change the printer settings, which affects the entire page and greatly slows down the print job, or convert the image into halftone. ‘Halftone’ is the process of reducing the image to dots – the denser the dots, the darker the portion of the image. It means a hit to resolution but actually much better results than trying to produce gradient tones from any printer that has two options: put ink down or don’t.
Thinking, Hey, that was a cool photo, I should feature that!, I went looking for it. And thought I’d found it with the above image, but after scanning, I could see the wings were different. Yet I never did find the original. Either I was blowing past it (I have several hundred slides in the Bird category, so…) or I’d shot it on negative film, longer ago than I thought. Or I lost it entirely, which is really damn hard for me to do, since the slides remain in sleeve pages unless actually being scanned or submitted, and I know when I’ve submitted them. Right now I’m going with blowing past it, so maybe it’ll appear later on when I go through the pages again while paying more attention.
But I can tell you, it looks good on the envelopes!