Platinum Printing

Carl Weese, On Gaudineer Mountain, West Virginia

Carl Weese tells me there are still a few slots left in his upcoming Platinum Printing workshop at The Center for Alternative Photography (CAP) in New York City on the weekend of December 3rd and 4th. See the CAP website (it's the 13th one down) for more information.

Carl's a very experienced teacher of this process. He's good.

Mike

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Comments

[Jim Bullard]

Now that's a photo that should be in the print sale. One of these days I would like to take such a workshop but it isn't in the budget right now :-(.

[Richard Taylor]

I wish I could go as am perparing to take on this process but am in the UK....

Any chance of a transcript?

[vlatko]

Hmmmm. I wonder whether Carl used the process with digital photos? Invert the photo in Photoshop and then project it directly onto the paper. How would that work?

(I did find people doing it commercially from digital files, but they apparently create negatives on film first.)

[carlweese]

vlatko, you can't make a Pt/Pd print by projection, it takes a long (minutes) exposure to intense ultraviolet light with a negative in direct contact with the paper. But it is possible to make a digital negative from either a scan or a digital capture and then contact print from that. These keep getting better, and now seem to be able to compete with enlarged negatives made the old fashioned way in the darkroom, but neither form of Pt/Pd enlargement matches the look of a direct contact print from the in-camera negative.

[Joseph]

Carl, I was going to join this class but I just got booked for a job that weekend. I am very disappointed as I was really looking forward to meeting you and getting more of an insight into platinum/palladium printing from a master printer. I am also working / volunteering with Eric at CAP to get some other projects rolling so hopefully our paths will cross soon.

[vlatko]

Carl, that was just speculating. The reason I asked, there're small xenon lamps - used in video projectors - that have a strong UV component. The IMAX projectors also have (bigger) xenon lamps with a lot of UV radiation. I can imagine using a second-hand projector with such a lamp for platinum printing.

From your description - when you wrote about platinum printing the first(?) time here - it takes a lot of lamps, but projectors are designed to be on for long times, so leaving it to light the paper for more than ten minutes wouldn't be a problem.

Or I'm imagining an esoteric extension to an already pretty esoteric process?

BTW, do you know what's the largest platinum print made? I saw that HP offers 24'-wide transparency rolls and that Bostick&Sullivan offer 22x30' platinum paper.

[carlweese]

vlatko,

My guess is that this would be more complex than scanning originals and making digital negatives, though I don't know which has the greater potential quality. I'm about to begin testing the HP digital negative system for the Z3200 printer, which I have.

Don't know what the world record is for platinum print size, but I saw a few prints from enlarged negatives at this year's AIPAD show that were a good 30".

[carlweese]

Joseph, sorry you can't make it this time. There's another scheduled for the end of the CAP winter season. Hope to see you then.