Photographic printing

cliveh

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What do you think are the essential qualities to become an excellent photographic printer of chemical silver prints?

I would suggest simplicity of purpose.

Appreciation of highlight values.

Blackness of shadows.

A midtone that sits in the perfect position between the two.

A value of all of the above to suit the picture rendition and message you are trying to achieve.

What do others think?
 

Alex Benjamin

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Patience. Lots and lots and lots of patience. And, as John said, experience, as it takes a long time to develop a critical eye that enable you to evaluate not only the print itself, but the possibilities of the negative.

In my mind, one of Ansel Adams' most interesting and perceptive comments about photography is when he compared the negative to a music score and the print to its interpretation. A good photograph—meaning, also, a good negative—has many possibilities, and it takes time, patience, self doubt, and a good critical eye, to figure them out. Not surprising that many of the great photographers that printed their own negs often came back to them after a few years, and did them differently than the time before.

This also means that another quality is the desire to experiment.

It's like any other craft. After a while, experience, fueled by experimentation, settles in, and things start flowing.

Good interview here with Pablo Inirio, Magnum's master printer. I love his description of "the flow":

I don’t rush in there much. I put on the music, I got the mood lighting going, the water’s running… it’s a zen kind of a thing. You can’t rush your judgment too much, so you might go have some coffee, come back and look at it again, figure out what it needs and then you do the print.

Interview with Pablo Inirio - Katherine Oktober Matthews

“I don’t want it going out of the darkroom unless I’m happy with it, you know? I don’t want to give people work that’s not up to my standards, and my standards are high. I’m tough on myself, I think I overdo it.”—Pablo Inirio (GUP Magazine)
oktobernight.com
 
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Rick A

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Start by paying close attention to detail in making as good a negative as possible. A robust properly exposed negative makes printing easier.
 

Don_ih

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I agree with Alex. And I agree with everything you said, @cliveh -- The one thing that bugs me when I'm making prints is the fact that I've not seen enough. I've not really had much opportunity to go to gallery or museum shows and see great prints in person. It can be difficult to know the possibilities when you haven't seen that much - so I compensate by screwing around a whole lot.
I also take part in exchanges which allow me to see what others do.

But, as a direct answer, I would say the key to being a good (if not great) darkroom printer is to not be limited by what you see in the negative but to be aware that you are in control of what that negative will put on paper and use all the tools you feel appropriate to make a print the way you think it should be. (That may also be a reason to not get someone else to print your negatives).
 

VinceInMT

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I took a Fine Print class when I was in college and the instructor started off by giving us each a 4x5 negative of a mundane scene he’d shot, making multiple negatives, and told us to go to the darkroom and make the best print we could. The range of images produced was wide and when defending our choices those defenses were equally wide. Even with lots of experience, personal taste factors in.
 

Pieter12

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1. Know what you want from the negative—how you want the print to look.
2. Work at it until you can achieve that result.
 

MattKing

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I found that one of the best things I ever did to improve my printing was to start printing for others - often without specific printing instructions other than a desire for a "nice" print.
It seems that decoupling the process of taking the photograph from the the process of printing the photograph helped improve my judgment about the printing process itself.
I'm leery of prescribing anything in particular with respect to shadows, highlights or mid-tones, because I think that the approach to those varies.
I do thing though, that as a general matter, with most images, the mid-tones are critical.
 

AnselMortensen

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What MattKing said. ^^^

Being the B/W custom printer in a photo lab, and having to make decent prints from customers' poorly-exposed negatives (using every trick in the book), good prints for half-tone reproduction, and "Wow!" prints from good negatives for 8 hours a day will make you a good printer.
 

xkaes

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It's simple -- just do your own tests. Don't just do what someone else does -- or tells you to do. Read Richard Henry's book, "Controls in B&W Photography". He shows you how to do your own tests. You are your own judge.
 

jamesaz

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This worked well for me also, doing production printing and learning darkroom techniques with other people’s money. Of course that has’t been an option for some time now.
 

MattKing

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jamesaz said:
This worked well for me also, doing production printing and learning darkroom techniques with other people’s money. Of course that has’t been an option for some time now.
Click to expand...

I'm actually getting prepared to print some family picture negatives for a friend. She printed them originally, but over the years those wall mounted prints have been damaged, she would like the prints replaced, and she doesn't have a darkroom set up any more.
 

koraks

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This sounds to me as a mix of characteristics of a printer but also of a print.

I'm not sure what would make a good printer. I'd like to interview at least a dozen or so really good printers before I'd wager a guess. It's one of those things I still have on my 'to do' list, but it's on the backburner a bit. I suspect it'll be something like the combination of:
(1) technical competence & theoretical knowledge in/of the printing process(es) offered,
(2) an autonomous artistic vision, which is required background knowledge for...
(3) ...an excellent ability to understand the intent of the photographer (maybe even better than they do, themselves) and
(4) the ability to combine all of those, at will, consistently and in every project,
(5) being sufficiently organized to do all of the above within the practical and economic constraints imposed by the job and the environment.
 

Don_ih

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snusmumriken said:
The thing that bugs me is never knowing whether someone else could do better with the same negative.
Click to expand...

I think the answer to that there is someone else that would do something different that you might think is better. There will always be someone who will get a result you couldn't anticipate.
 

Daniela

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snusmumriken said:
The thing that bugs me is never knowing whether someone else could do better with the same negative.
Click to expand...

Funny you bring that up because I was thinking that, just like we do postcard exchanges, I'd love to send out one of my negatives and see what people do with it. I thought of this because I've asked for printing help before and people suggest things that had never crossed my mind. Also, there are many experienced printers here, so it'd be a cool thing to see!
 

Don_ih

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That has happened here. You could always set it up. Some people would join in.
 

snusmumriken

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Daniela said:
Thanks for mentioning it!
Click to expand...

I really like the idea, but I feel I might be reluctant to send any negative that I thought was good. (And nothing of importance among the five neighbouring negatives, of course, because I shoot 35mm.) Would I ever see it again? Would it get damaged?

If I couldn’t overcome those anxieties, the exchange would be limited to ‘negatives that didn’t make the cut unless they could be rescued by clever printing’. Unfortunately I’m inclined to the view that if the negative hasn’t got interest, no amount of printing will add it. That’s a personal thing, I accept: I’m aware that there are photographers like eg Kit Young who seem to do exactly that.

But what I’m really interested in is getting the very best out of negatives that have definitely captured something that I like. Some of those will have technical faults that make them awkward to print, but not always.

Maybe I’m being much too precious - please do talk me into it!
 

MattKing

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You don't use a negative that is very special to you.
You create multiple duplicate negatives of something that is interesting to you and interesting to print, and then send them to other people, with the intention that they not return them.
 

Don_ih

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snusmumriken said:
Would I ever see it again? Would it get damaged?
Click to expand...

Assume it would be damaged. Assume it would be gone forever.

So shoot a roll of film with duplicate exposures - one to keep for yourself, the other to send away.
 

MurrayMinchin

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Yikes! What a complex question!!!

Ansel said that some people are tone deaf to music, and others can be 'print value deaf' (my wording) when it comes to B&W prints. This suggests that just like some people have highly refined taste buds, others can have eyes highly attuned to the textures and tones in photographs. It helps to be in the latter group.

Showing my age here, but also believe Fred Picker was right when he said that once you get a good white and a good black, you have a work print. Knowing how and where to bring things out, hold things back, and eliminate annoying distractions is when the magic starts to happen...if done to support what the photographer/image is trying to say.

Finding the right paper & chemistry combination is critical.

For the way I worked (past tense...explanation later) using pin registered sharp & unsharp masks, I had to come up with a way to pick up from where I left off a day, or even weeks later if coming up with a good mask was difficult, or if I moved on to another print for a break.

It had to account for temperature changes, and because the working solution developer could be reused and lasted in airtight containers for several months, the method also had to account for starting a print with 'old' developer and picking it up again with fresh developer. The old and new prints had to match.

I ended up tweaking an Ansco 120 recipe with Glycin to give it longevity: https://www.photrio.com/forum/resources/12-15-developer.123/

Now, to explain the past tense thing...

I kept working & learning how to make the very best prints I possibly could, then once having arrived there, found they didn't say what they should. They looked to me, once mounted, over matted, and framed, like looking through a window to a scene distant & removed. Odd thing is, I can enjoy or be amazed by other peoples traditionally printed, matted & framed photographs, but when it came to my work, they just felt wrong.

Felt a need to produce art objects to be held in the hand, on old world papers of character. Have wandered down salt print and Kallitype roads, and currently turning the corner towards polymer photogravure where Kozo, Gampi, and Chine Colle are whispering my name.

Maybe the one essential quality is; never being satisfied, always questing for more clarity. Once you are content & satisfied as an artist, you're dead in the water.

*Edit* also used 12/15 for negatives, so can be used as a universal developer.
 
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Bill Burk

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Don_ih said:
That has happened here. You could always set it up. Some people would join in.
Click to expand...

That was fun, but a bit painful. My 6x9 negatives all from 0149 batch of TMY2 had Kodak emblazoned on them. I still have the 4x5 negative that was shared with me, I couldn’t figure out how to improve on the negative itself because it was a beautiful mountain scene with clouds and snow. All I could see in my mind was a straight print.
 
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