The problem with looking at other's work on the internet is that you can't be sure what you are seeing on your monitor is what the photographer intended. Color can vary and luminance can too. Books are the real deal.
Um, yes and no. Books can vary through a print run too, depending on how well the printer keeps their machines in spec and how big a run they make. Choices in what paper to use, what size to make, what printer to choose (and in that I mean what printing company because very few printing companies have more than one or two choices of actual printing hardware to work with), all matter. And Print On Demand (POD) book printing, such as Blurb, exacerbates these problems.
For example, my one "for sale" photo book was designed for and printed by Blurb. I ran at least four proofs of it, changing the density and color balances of half the prints by small amounts as well as trying two paper choices, before I felt satisfied that it was ready to place a 'real' order for the 85 or so pre-orders I'd taken at the reception. And I inspected about 50% of those fulfilled orders: I found variations throughout, but deemed them acceptably within range.
Current computer driven displays improve every year, some are now very good and very stable, so looking at my own work (always tagged with color profile) across a wide variety of displays, computers, tablets, and smart phones, I've found that in recent years the variations have become pretty small and almost as consistent as a POD print run.
There are few absolutes in this game. Ansel Adams in the 1920s-1930s was so distraught with the consistency and quality of book printing that he chose for a small run of books to print every page by hand himself, in his darkroom, and finish out the books in his workshop by himself. A friend of mine resurrected this notion a few years back and produced about a dozen absolutely amazing, hand-crafted books this way. He gave one of them to me ... it is without a doubt my most treasured book and is a work of art from the book jacket onwards. I count it as priceless, irreproducible, artwork.
If you place arbitrary limits on what you consider to be a finished photograph and worry about all the things that might go wrong, you can easily fall into the trap of "perfection paralysis" and never produce anything. I choose to work to the point of "good enough for my satisfaction" and let it go beyond that. I know the results on computer screen and even in print can be variable, I do my best to constrain the variability so that something of my intent can be expressed, and have to take it as a given that nothing is ever really perfectly consistent.
Viewers of photographs on line and in books have to learn to see past the variabilities of the media too.
🙂
G
