Don't shoot the Rookie :D

srobb_photo said:

I don't shoot a whole lot of slides, yet, but that is what I would like to concentrate on even with my 35mm. I just think it gives me a better finished product than regular color film does. I love Velvia.

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Srobb,
Between Ilfochrome/cibachrome and chromira/lightjet images; both processes are absoulouty fantastic. If you ever want to explore the ilfochrome side of printing ...please let me know, I will be glad to help.

I hope you stick around for awhile.

Cheers

Shane

Shane Knight said:

Srobb,
Between Ilfochrome/cibachrome and chromira/lightjet images; both processes are absoulouty fantastic. If you ever want to explore the ilfochrome side of printing ...please let me know, I will be glad to help.

I hope you stick around for awhile.

Cheers

Shane

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Thanks, Shane, I probably will. I think it is just in my nature to get things stirred up at times. I don't mean to do it on purpose, or in a mean way.

To be quite honest, I know nothing at all on the analog style of slide processing. Have never done that myself. Now I have done my own b&w developing, but that was mainly while I was in the Army and stationed where they had a craft section. I fell in love with it and to be quite honest, I hope to be able to do that myself again.

I love b&w and have been seeing a resurgence of it's popularity here and there. The only thing I know of slide developing is that I drop them off at my lab and pick them up later. Now what process they use, I am not sure. I just know he is very good.

srobb_photo said:

. . . . . .

I love b&w and have been seeing a resurgence of it's popularity here and there. The only thing I know of slide developing is that I drop them off at my lab and pick them up later. Now what process they use, I am not sure. I just know he is very good.

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Forgot to say Welcome to APUG, though I hope you stay, or at the very least give it a trial run of a few months. I do about the same as you with getting my transparency films printed, simply dropping them off at the primary lab I use. All I want from them is to match what I see on the transparency onto the continuous tone print they make for me. It was only very recently that I aksed more about the process of making the prints, and found out they are mostly using a LightJet. I am happy with these continuous tone prints for my fine art images.

Ciao!

Gordon

Thanks, Gordon. Bremerhaven, eh. I remember that city pretty good. Was stationed for two years in Germany south of Bremen; another gorgeous city there. I am always willing to learn new things about photography.

srobb_photo: feel free to ask anytime. Sure, we don't always agree on everything, but that is what makes this a great community. FWIW, you would be surprised what you can get out of 35mm. I use West Coast Imaging for all my scanning and printing, so feel free to ask if you have any questions about them - some of the top landscape photographers in the business use them; people like Jack Dykinga (in my mind, the top landscape photographer working today), Michael Forsberg, and Robert Glenn Ketchum, among others. They print as I do, on Chromira/Fuji Cystal Archive.

54 replies in this thread and no one has said it yet so I may as well.

Photographs are not prints. Prints are not photographs. When you photograph a negative in the dark room using a big sheet of paper-backed photographic emulsion you are photographing not printing. The use of the word "print" in relation to genuine photographs has been a long term disaster that has cost photography immeasurable status and individual photographers millions of dollars.

Prints carry the connotation of low value, mechanical production, leading to indistinguishable multiple copies. Photographs have, in every case, to be made anew from first principles: exposure, development, fixing, and finishing. Every photograph is, in its own right, an original and not a copy.

I think it would be a good thing if photographers stopped saying "print" and started saying "photograph". With the advance of electonic picture making methods this is a good time in history to ditch bad conventional parlance and re-affirm the value of photographs by talking them up not down.

I should confess that Maris' point of view made me thinking about the etimology and the usual errors that might appear when translating. In Romanian language (my native language) "photography" is a word primarily used as intended by Herschel, while "print" is used for a process with a machine at the end of the production flow. Following the technological changes, now we are using "photography" for any kind of image on paper, no matter the process.
I don't say that a combined process route should be blamable, but it should be fitted for the purpose and a honest producer (the artist himself or a third party) should state the process route. Our photo copies on the web are present thanks to the digital route, that's obvious. But what about the ones on paper? Is the target viewer / buyer a low-cost oriented one? In this case "printing" is fitted for purpose. Is an educated and quality-oriented one? That's a different story.
What may confuse about 80% (do you have a better guess?) of the usual viewers of an image on paper is the difference between "photography" and "print", because most of them lack basic knowledge in this area or just weren't aware of the difference. Ironically, a larger number are aware of the difference between a hand-made sweeter and a machine-made one. At least this is the situation here, in Romania. I'm curious, it's the same elsewhere?
Now, returning to the original question of srobb_photo, my opinion is that shooting on film and printing scanned images is more than the complete digital process only if some darkroom adjustements are involved in. However, it is something like a warm beer in a hot summer: it smels and tastes like a beer, but the pleasure of drinking it is gone. Using film processed in a (quick) lab only for scaning and printing (and no "wet" photos) is just avoiding investment in a digital equipment; but it's a way of producing images and may have its own place as a visual art.

Maris said:

Prints carry the connotation of low value, mechanical production, leading to indistinguishable multiple copies. Photographs have, in every case, to be made anew from first principles: exposure, development, fixing, and finishing. Every photograph is, in its own right, an original and not a copy.

I think it would be a good thing if photographers stopped saying "print" and started saying "photograph". With the advance of electonic picture making methods this is a good time in history to ditch bad conventional parlance and re-affirm the value of photographs by talking them up not down.

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Very well thought out. I shall try to remember this in the future.

HerrBremerhaven said:

I would guess he might still be starting with film, but since he is very into technology it would be hard to tell how he is now doing things; of course someone could just pop him an e-mail and ask.

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Dan abandoned film some time ago. His current camera of choice is a Canon 5D, which I recently purchased on his recommendation and have found it to be a fantastic tool.

HerrBremerhaven said:

Forgot to say Welcome to APUG, though I hope you stay, or at the very least give it a trial run of a few months. I do about the same as you with getting my transparency films printed, simply dropping them off at the primary lab I use. All I want from them is to match what I see on the transparency onto the continuous tone print they make for me. It was only very recently that I aksed more about the process of making the prints, and found out they are mostly using a LightJet. I am happy with these continuous tone prints for my fine art images.

Ciao!

Gordon

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Gordon,

Like you, I just want the final print to look like the transparency. But, a lot of people get a mistaken impression that it is as simple as dropping the film at the lab and picking up the print. Both Rich and I both work with our printers through the whole process - in my case, paying extra for work prints - to make sure the print is right; that can mean instructing the printer to dodge or burn in areas, or to mask areas of the print (all things we would do with a darkroom printer). I never instruct the printer to do anything that can't be duplicated in the darkroom.

HerrBremerhaven said:

A quick glance through the colour images in the APUG Gallery shows some C-Prints. Seriously, how would someone tell if that was from an enlarger or a LightJet, Chromira, or Durst Lambda?

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You can't tell the difference between a print off a LightJet, Chromira, Lambda or an Omega D5500 enlarger. They are all continuous tone prints. I just won't lie and say my prints were done with an enlarger - I've been very upfront about my printing methods, for as long as I have been on APUG.

Seems that short of doing that verification, only a Cibachrome (Ilfochrome) could really be without question done from an enlarger.

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Actually, Elevator Gallery in Toronto prints Cibachrome (Ilfochrome) on a Lamba printer, and I imagine that there are other labs that do as well.

roteague said:

Gordon,

Like you, I just want the final print to look like the transparency. But, a lot of people get a mistaken impression that it is as simple as dropping the film at the lab and picking up the print. Both Rich and I both work with our printers through the whole process - in my case, paying extra for work prints - to make sure the print is right; that can mean instructing the printer to dodge or burn in areas, or to mask areas of the print (all things we would do with a darkroom printer). I never instruct the printer to do anything that can't be duplicated in the darkroom.

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Hello Robert,

I don't do nearly the volume of fine art prints as either of you, since it is something I do mostly to build an exposure history to get into a Master's Degree program. My fine art just breaks even, which is about as much as I could hope to achieve. I had the thought of doing more prints to put together a portfolio, though cost and frequency of changes means a more commercially printed approach looks better for that.

With the main lab that does my fine art images, at first I had a smaller proof done of each, and then the larger image. There were a few that I thought were not quite correct, and suggested some adjustments. However, I am very much a purist with my fine art images in that the images are not cropped, and the colours need to be as close as possible to the transparency. I don't consider images that could benefit from dodging or burning, since I have enough other images to choose that work well enough. Perhaps with a higher volume I would try dodging or burning in colour images, since I am not opposed to doing that with B/W images; I just have not yet had a need to try that yet.

The other thing is I do not do any series of images. Each is a one off. I might consider having a larger version of a particular image done, but I have yet to have such a request. I don't reproduce my oil paintings, so I feel the need to treat my fine art photography in the same manner. I have nothing against those who do signed and numbered series of images.

Ciao!

Gordon

roteague said:

You can't tell the difference between a print off a LightJet, Chromira, Lambda or an Omega D5500 enlarger. They are all continuous tone prints. I just won't lie and say my prints were done with an enlarger - I've been very upfront about my printing methods, for as long as I have been on APUG.

Actually, Elevator Gallery in Toronto prints Cibachrome (Ilfochrome) on a Lamba printer, and I imagine that there are other labs that do as well.

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Hello again Robert,

Nice to hear you are upfront about this, though I would not expect everyone to be that way. I have been asked by a few people about some of my fine art images being altered in software. What I do on my exhibit opening is bring a portable light table and the actual transparency of the image I am displaying. Then I get questions about how I got such an effect in-camera. Many people going to gallery openings at some of the places I exhibit seem to expect manipulated images, and are often surprised about what can be done using film. Like you, I also explain a little about what a C-print or Chromogenic Print process is about, though simplify it by explaining that it comes from film and goes onto photographic paper, using either laser or LEDs (depends upon machine). It was more technical questions that led me to discover more about Chromira and LightJet printers.

Okay, so now that I am reading about Cibachrome on a Lambda . . . I guess that means that if someone wanted to be dishonest about representing colour images as hand-made enlarger prints then anyone could do so. This is a popular website, with potential for sales of images, and that might be enough to tempt someone. Short of banning all colour prints from the APUG Gallery sales area, I don't see much way around avoid those who might be tempted to be dishonest. Perhaps a verification procedure would be needed?

Seriously, the only images in APUG Gallery that really surprised me where the re-photographed Vogue magazine images. Obviously way beyond technical issues there, onto more of an ethical or copyrights issue, unless that photographer had permission from the Vogue magazine photographers of the originals. This also brings up a verification issue, but for different reasons.

Fine art photography is at the bottom of income for professional photographers, at least according to very recent surveys across the industry. I applaud the resource of an outlet, though like any physical gallery space, a level of verification might actually help. I don't know where the sales are going, and hopefully outside those people in APUG; it would be nice to know that APUG could attract an outside audience; people should be able to appreciate the efforts of film using photographers, even if they are not using film or do not have a desire to participate in a Forum on the internet.

Ciao!

Gordon

Actually, Elevator will do digital B&W on fibre paper too, so I guess that means if someone wants to be dishonest about it, they can make digitally manipulated B&W images on fibre paper and pass them off as analog prints too.