MattKing said:
"In my experience, darkroom materials that are designed for commercial or industrial or educational environments are usually the most robust and dependable available. If Sprint is selling into that market, they are selling into the most demanding market of them all. Low quality materials in those environments create way more problems for a manufacturer than any materials designed primarily for small darkroom use.
What they may lack is flexibility - that tends to be the result of designing for dependability and robustness."
MattKing is a guy worth listening to, methinks. And his post is the best one of it's ilk I've read in years.
His experiences seem to parallel mine in commercial kitchens (my Mom was a chef). Our ingredients were bought in bulk, and plain old generic tomato paste, which was the basis of about half the sauces we made, came from a source that most home kitchen folk wouldn't recognize, or even use because it had no "brand-name" snob appeal. But it was great stuff. We worked from a fixed system of equipment and products, and got to know the "feel of them" intimately because we didn't change them.
And you said:
"Finally, and you guys are not going to like this, I would like to hear from people who are master printers, those of you who are printers and do this as a job as a living, people like Bob Solomon and Dan (Kodachrome) and only the most Nikki D printers, not those who are less than precise in there methods or think that things are "good enough" I would also welcome comments from the likes of PE etc."
Well, I did a three year stint at the "Really Big Print Company" in Vancouver as a darkroom rat and printer of giant enlargements. I think you've got it backwards. I bet money in large amounts that there are guys on this forum (myself included), who are WAYYYYY more precise in what we do in our own darkrooms than many do at the lab. While most public might not have access to temperature-controlled equipment as labs do, you can get it. And this is pretty much the exclusive property of color processing.
At Really Big, we used ONE negative developer (D76), ONE paper developer (a soup we mixed ourselves that was similar to Ansco 130 but allowed us to add chemicals or change dilutions to lower or raise contrast, etc), ONE stopper (Kodak Indicator), ONE Fixer, a plain non-hardening fix we used similar to Ilford quick-fix because we usually toned our prints, FOUR toners depending on what the customer wanted or which of 4 paper stocks we printed the negatives on. Even internegs were shot on a 4x5 and souped in D76 with a thing or two added on the way.
We used little in the way of temperature control, doing everything by eye. (The darkroom was about 30'x20', lit from above with amber safelights, and there was a vestibule we entered that allowed us to get used to low light before printing. Our wash was a great big plywood trough that had a hose running into it from the cold water tap, and we rinsed the pictures for two hours in the icy flow. Never had a problem toning.
If we used anything else besides chemicals named above, we went out and bought it that day, used it, labelled the job a "special order," and that's it. If you had seen us work, I'm sure you'd have considered us sloppy. I remember running out of stop, and using vinegar (photo stores are not usually open at 3:00 AM). We even drank water from the trough in rinsed Nikkor film tanks, used the same water to mix in our Scotch which was always present in volume at the lab (we were often drunk at work) . . . . But our work was considered the best in town, and from what I saw, it was.
Most "great" printers use one system and variants to produce their work, and are not "experimenters" throwing chemicals around like some painters spatch paint and other substances on a canvas. Beethoven was not an experimenter . . . he used the idiom around him developed by the likes of Clementi and Steibelt and simply did it better than anyone else. Very few greats are experimenters, rather they are culminatory figures. Control of product is everything.
I've won a couple of exhibitions with my own prints, and I use Dektol, Kodak Indicator, and Kodafix for what I do, unless I have a very good reason not to. With this set, D76, Rodinal and a few other odds and ends, I can deal with just about anything with this limited palette. Almost all of my printing used to be done on Luminos X or Gloss, or Kodak Ektalure. Now that I can't get these I use Kentmere pretty much for everything.
Most artists in other areas, from my experiences, are minimalists as well. I think Sprint chemicals must be very good if they are reaching a commercial market, but probably come in volumes that are inconvenient for the homebrewer.
Best of luck in your project!
thanks!
