PUBLICATION CENTER

Hilton Head photographer Ben Ham added his personal touch with fine art photography to HGTV’s 2008 Green Home. How large-format photography and printing makes a decorative difference.

Last year, HGTV’s first Green Home giveaway sweepstakes brought in an astounding 21 million entries. The three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath home in Hilton Head, S.C. located in a 5,300-acre master-planned community featured construction and design elements that contribute to energy efficiency.

One of the important “green” ingredients in the home was the use of local talent, materials, and furnishings to minimize the environmental impact of long-distance transportation, so HGTV enlisted Hilton Head’s high-end furnishings and design studio Seasons to help with the décor.

In turn, Seasons turned to seasoned fine-art photographer and Hilton Head local Ben Ham. Though Ham is local and his signature work comes from South Carolina’s low country, he is also renowned nationwide for his black-and-white large-format landscape photography from America’s Western frontiers.

Photography as Fine Art

“Anyone can take a picture of a tree, but Ben captures a mood and a moment. I consider it as much fine art as an oil painting. I don’t differentiate photography from painting, and I try to incorporate Ben’s photography in everything I do,” says Linda Conlkin, owner of Seasons. “It works so well with other pieces of art, and it can be either very traditional or contemporary, depending on the home, and I’ve used them in all types of design situations. It’s so easy to work Ben’s photography into a design.”

Linda Woodrum, who designs the HGTV Green Homes and is a frequent shopper at Seasons, contacted Conklin about furnishing and decorating the Hilton Head Green Home. Though only one of many design elements inside the home, Ham’s photo was a perfect scene setter for the empty wall space adjacent to the kitchen. Conklin emphasizes that fine-art photography is not simply filler, but an integral part of the overall design, helpful in evoking emotion and attachment to a place.

Ham’s ability to capture the nuances of a particular setting is only part of the story of what makes his work so appealing and sought after. Another crucial component is in rendering the finished piece that will hang proudly in someone’s home, resort, restaurant, or gallery. Ham does all of his printing, trimming, and framing in-house, using the highest quality equipment and materials possible.

Photographic Details

“I’m putting out the best package I can possibly provide, and I have always felt that was the way to go, rather than skimping on framing, glass, and printing,” explains Ham. “If you’re paying for an interior designer, you have a fair amount of disposable income so you’re not looking for anything inexpensive. You have to go the whole nine yards with it.”

"I often see a really nice shot or artwork in an inexpensive frame. It detracts from the piece,” he adds. “All of my work is framed using 100-percent acid free materials and museum glass. I use a 4" wide imported Italian frame, and I buy it 300-500 feet at a time. That helps me with price and gives me enough material on the ground so as the orders flow through I don't have any down time. Once the designer or end-customer sees the piece, they're blown away by it. The people I work with now, or have worked with, never ask for just a print. It's always framed. I'm making money off the printed work and the framing."

For his large-format prints, Ham uses a 44-in. wide Epson Stylus Pro 9800 printer, driven by Photoshop and the ImagePrint RIP, which translates the digital files more efficiently and effectively from the software to the printer. He typically prints on LexJet Sunset and Hahnemuhle fine-art papers, and used Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Satin for the HGTV Green Home. The final framed piece was 56 in. x 87 in.

“My smallest piece framed is 39 in. x 47 in., and those are starting to look pretty small to me. When I put the big pieces out over the small pieces, I sell the big pieces faster. Most of the folks who buy them have big wall space, and of course the big pieces have excellent detail when they’re printed that large so that you feel like you can step right into them,” says Ham.

On the front end, Ham uses an 8x10 wood view field camera, complete with a dark cloth and spot meter. Though extremely well-versed in Photoshop and digital inkjet printing, Ham prefers to capture in analog. From some of his first golf course landscape photographs to his more recent black-and-white work with natural landscapes from the Carolinas to California, Ham has built on and perfected this foundational process.

"It suits what I do; it's very slow and contemplative. I need time to really think about the scene, instead of firing off images left and right. Everything becomes somewhat abstract from a compositional standpoint because the image is upside down and backwards, so you tend to really look at things before you ever pull the camera out," explains Ham.

Initial scans of the 4x5 negatives are done on Ham's Epson scanner as a proofing method. Once an image is chosen to become a fine art print, the negative is sent out for high-resolution drum scanning. Ham shoots using black-and-white film, but the images are created in Photoshop as RGB files.

"Almost everything I do has a sepia tone to it, and the images are developed in RGB. I use the ImagePrint RIP, and even though it allows you to do a lot of toning, I prefer to use Photoshop for that," explains Ham. "I wanted to be able to do everything I could do in the darkroom with the computer. I don't do image manipulation, but I dodge and burn, mostly using localize contrast control. Photoshop's tools far surpass what you can do in the darkroom. I get it exactly the way I want in Photoshop before I export it to the RIP, and RIP it straight from there."

Though Ham will sometimes use the RIP to maximize tones in his images, it's primarily used to manage the immense file sizes and speed up the printing process. Otherwise, there would be a lot of clock-watching.

Ham has been printing black-and-white images almost exclusively, but his work is known for its sepia tone, which he creates, based on the original tonal qualities of the images, in Photoshop. Ham creates his sepia tone using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, clicking on the colorization box and setting Hue at 38, the Saturation level he usually sets between 8 and 17 percent depending on the qualities of light in the image.

He then creates a Color Balance layer and adjusts the shadows by moving the Yellow-Blue slider 4 or 5 points toward Blue to better neutralize the dark points for a truer black, then a very slight adjustment in the Highlights toward Yellow.

Though Ham works with a number of galleries, he prefers to work directly with interior designers and furnishing shops like Seasons. It cuts out the middleman and provides both with a little added profit while making it a more integral part of the home’s overall design. Ham also stresses the point of showing interior designers the fully finished piece, frame and all, so that they can see, in person, the full impact a large-format inkjet print can really have.

“When I meet with an interior designer, I carry the piece I’m showing them in such a way that it could be any type of fine art, like an oil painting. And when I spin it around and show it to them, the argument that they can’t hang photography on the wall dissipates,” says Ham. “You have to see the whole package when you present your work. It’s like buying a car. If all you could see is the brochure or the dashboard at the dealership you wouldn’t sell as many cars. If I take them unframed, it doesn’t have the same impact. You have to present it in the best possible light, and you don’t put your best work in an inexpensive frame or on generic photo paper.”