Dark Days of Photography

Recently, when I was visiting Jeff and Becky, I noticed that the photographs on my web site were very, very dark on her monitor. I also noticed a somewhat similar situation on my work monitor, although the photos were not quite near as dark as on Becky's monitor. Last night Lynn and Will were over for dinner and Christmas gift exchange and Lynn commented that my recent photos were all dark on her monitor. How very odd.

I showed Lynn the new iMac and I asked her opinion on my recent photo of the U.S.S. Constellation and showed her the image on the iMac.
"Wow that looks completely different than on my monitor," she said with a little amazement. "On my monitor at home it is really dark. It looks nothing like this at all. I was thinking that you were headed in some very different artistic direction and I have been meaning to ask you about it."
"No, no new direction. So they look dark huh? How dark? Can you explain it by comparing it to what you see here?" I asked.
"Oh sure. There are no real whites when I look at your recent images at home. It's all deep shadow and the sky is really dark too," Lynn explained.
"That is really odd. Because you can see how they look here and when I print them they print the same way. Nice and bright. Maybe folks just have their monitors set too dark. I don't know what to think except that I would hate for people to be seeing my work in ways that I did not intend."
Of course I don't know how people are actually seeing my work on their own PCs, but if my images look really dark to you please know they are not suppossed to. I work very hard at making high quality presentations, and honestly, on my iMac and my old Dell Pentium PC, and when I print them, the photos look nice and bright, sharp and clear just like the images I displayed in the gallery show. Damn, this really bugs me.