The Online Photographer

Part I: Point-Counterpoint on Printing

Anthony Shaughnessy: "I'm quite confused by the things I'm reading here. My experience is nothing like what most people are suggesting and I simply cannot see why you would prefer sending your prints out instead of doing them yourself, unless you go the Costco route to get maximum cheapness.

"I had an Epson SP-2100 for about ten years and made a lot of prints (which I sell). It gave me almost no trouble at all. A handful of clogs which cleared easily with a head clean. Whether used regularly, or left idle for months. It wasn't too difficult to get going when I first bought it and once set up it is literally a case of press the button and print. I now have an Epson SC-P600 and it's even easier. With the 2100 I used custom-made paper profiles but with the P600 the canned profiles are, as far as I can see, perfect.

"It seems to be that all the skill and artistic interpretation is not in the printing stage, but in the editing/processing stage. Whether the final result is just on screen or a print, it's the same—you edit/process the file until it looks like you want it on your calibrated monitor. That's the reference—the image on the monitor. You then press the button to print and assuming your system is set up well it should come out on the print pretty much like it looks on the monitor, albeit with a little less contrast and the paper white might make a difference. If you send it out to a pro lab you are expecting the print to come back looking just the way it does on the monitor.

"I honestly can't see what skill the pro print labs put into the matter apart from setting up their printer to work. You send them a finished file, probably a JPEG, that you have edited yourself. The file looks the way you want it. They receive the file and press a button to send it to the printer. They don't manipulate the file in any significant way, they just press the button.

"Yes, buying a good inkjet printer is expensive (about £600 for my latest Epson SC-P600). Yes it hurts every time you have to buy a load of ink and paper. Yes it costs money for every print, but the satisfaction is easily worth it (for me)."

Homo_erectus: "After the Great Recession, I was unemployed and decided to change industries. My state has a worker retraining program and I took advantage of that to move to the print industry.

"I spent a year in a 25 credit per quarter certificate program doing every kind of printing under the sun and learning the ins and outs of both traditional and digital print production.

"At the end of that year I was qualified to take an entry level job where people who had around a century of cumulative experience taught me how to actually do the things I'd learned about in school. It took me two or three years working 40-60 hours a week to reach competence.

"As a print professional I have access to specialized tools and knowledge that most people outside the industry have no reason to imagine would exist. If I have a question I can call my support rep and he can either answer it or talk to the engineers that designed the printer, or the programmers who wrote the code, and find out what I am asking about.

"Is it possible that a highly motivated person sitting at home with their shiny new retail inkjet printer can get good work out of it? Sure. Eventually. Is it likely? Not particularly. Will it be affordable? Hell no.

"I don't want to discourage people, because printing is awesome. It's super rewarding, especially when you are printing your own work, but be realistic. It's going to take a lot of time, education, trail and error, luck, and persistence for a lone person sitting at home to work out a quality workflow that yields consistent, high quality results. And, wouldn't you rather spend that time honing your photographic skills?

"For most photographers in the digital age, print isn't a core skill. It's ancillary at best. There's so much cost, time, education, and practice involved in photography, let alone digital processing, most people would just be better served to learn how to process their files for print and send them off to any of the many professional print houses in the world."

[From the Comments. Emphases mine. —Ed.]

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Keith B: "Re 'It's going to take a lot of time, education, trail and error, luck, and persistence for a lone person sitting at home to work out a quality workflow that yields consistent, high quality results,' my experience is that if you already did this way back when you learned how to print in the darkroom, learning to inkjet print is relatively easy, fast, and fun."

Thomas Rink: "In response to what 'Homo_erectus' wrote: I made three mistakes when I started out printing. 1. Printing 'big' (i.e. A3+); 2. Using expensive 'fine art' paper; 3. Trying to achieve a perfect print. All these mistakes in combination prevented me from experimenting since they drove up the cost. For me, the key was to switch to inexpensive A4 sized paper—this finally allowed me to make mistakes to learn from. I would by no means claim to be a master printer, and don't care about it either. But I get results that I'm satisfied with, and this is what matters to me."

Is Home Printing Too Expensive?

Reader Peter Croft, who lives in Australia, said yesterday:

The Epson P800 is still on sale here, for AU$1,596 = US$1,005. But a set of inks for these printers totals AU$711. I guess professionals can recoup the cost, but it's out of the question for me. My Stylus Photo R2880 is still going and will have to see me out, I think, as long as I can still get the inks. Even those cost me about AU$250 a set. It's an expensive business, really too expensive for a home enthusiast.

I've sometimes thought the same thing. I have to admit that when I look back on my history of home printing without blinders on, it's pockmarked with failure. I also have a psychological block with the practice of "ink gouging"—the typical model of selling printers cheap but ink dear. Much has been made of the high cost of printer ink—for the price of one gallon of ink, you can buy 2,250 gallons of milk, and ink is more expensive than champagne, Chanel perfume, and human blood. Despite that, they keep raising prices. It's particularly galling that not only do they charge hugely marked-up prices for ink, but the printers are designed to clean themselves by...using up ink. Gaaah! I was especially incredulous when a printer manufacturer representative once told me that using aftermarket, off-brand ink wasn't recommended because it might cause their printers to clog...heck, THEIR inks cause their printers to clog!! So what's the difference?!

My problem with ink gouging is essentially neurotic. It's partly because over the course of my life, I've spent more time as a freelancer, dependent on my wits and luck, than I have working for a company for a steady salary, and I went through a "personal depression" from about 2003–2006 during which time I probably wouldn't have been okay were it not for help from a family member. You learn to be cautious. It just goes against the grain that I'm being exploited and price-gouged for ink, and that I willingly put myself in the way of their scheme—it can overwhelm the pleasure I take in making prints. It's in my head, though. I should be able to be more rational about it. I never felt that way about photo paper and darkroom chemicals.

Once burned, twice shy
I seem to recall that Kodak tried to market a line of printers for which the ink was reasonably priced—I presume that meant with nothing more than a pedestrian 200% markup or some such—but they were basic printers with dye-based inks and I guess that wasn't good enough. No less a company than HP, after making some brilliant high-end products, fled the photo-printer field. Too tough a niche, I guess. (It still makes printers.) So my struggles with the HP B9180, a fantastically frustrating device capable of really gorgeous results on paper, turned out to have been a struggle for its maker, too. I used that thing for years—well, several of them—learned all its peccadilloes the hard way, and made some flat-out gorgeous prints with it, yet never truly got it "on song," meaning, such that it just dependably worked.

The B9180 would simply trail off if a printhead went wonky during the course of a print, ruining the print that was underway. I still remember the distressed feeling I would get over losing all that precious ink.

And yet somehow, the conventional wisdom persists that making inkjet prints from digital files is "easy." All you do is "press a button." I guess it's easy if you've got a little four-color dye-based office printer set up as a peripheral and you're not all that picky about color. And of course, it's received wisdom that darkroom printing was much harder, more expensive, and more time-consuming. Maybe, but my opinion is that of the two, inkjet printing might be the more difficult.

Not to mention it's a constantly moving target. All my hard-won knowledge about the ways of that old B9180, for instance, is useless information now.

From C to B is a win but...
We were talking about home stereos yesterday, and something I read in an audiophile magazine way back in the 1980s, during the dawn of the Compact Disc or CD, comes to mind. A writer said that vinyl playback could be anywhere from a D– to an A+ in quality (and that most non-audiophiles had never experienced more than a C from it at best), whereas all CD playback was in the B– to B+ range. The point was that it was much easier to get pretty good quality from digital audio (and most consumers experienced it as an improvement), but that getting really top quality from it more difficult. I've wondered whether the same thing might be true of digital inkjet printing—it's not difficult to get a pretty good result pretty easily, but to get a really outstanding result is elusive, and requires finicky equipment, lots of expense, and a large amount of acquired expertise.

I know it's uncomfortable for any enthusiast to admit to having persistent problems with any aspect of a hobby they ought to have mastered—you blame yourself, one of the bedrock manipulations of modern marketing being that when the end-user has problems it's got to be cast as being their fault, rather than the fault of the manufacturer or the product—but what's your take on Peter's comment? Is inkjet printing too expensive to do at home? Overall, is it more rewarding, or more frustrating? If I'm honest, I'm kinda on the fence. (And, just like I'm supposed to, I feel like that's my own fault.)

Mike
(Thanks to Peter C.)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "I think yesterday's comment by Patrick Dodds was on point: printers are for people who either need or have a strong desire to print. Dilettantes (and no, I'm not pointing fingers, Mike) need not apply.

"Besides, home printing is not the only way to produce top-quality prints. When you consider that digital print labs have tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of specialized hardware and software, and decades of experience, it takes an unreasonable amount of confidence to believe you can do a better job at home and at a fraction of the cost."

Mike replies: The argument in favor of home darkroom work—as the onetime editor of a home darkroom magazine, we needed to have such arguments thought through  :-)  —was that you had one big advantage at home: you didn't need to make your time pay. So you could take your time and reiterate and refine to your heart's content until you got it just exactly the way you wanted it. The commercial custom printer didn't have that luxury. They had better equipment and more experience, but they often had minutes to your hours or even days, and one sheet of paper to your five or ten sheets or even more. The other argument is that you are the only person who knows exactly what you want. When a commercial printmaker does a print for me, I often have to request changes. That doesn't mean I'm a better printer than he is or that I have better judgement; it just means we have different taste, and I know precisely how I want my picture to look whereas he's guessing.

So those are the arguments for DIY at home. Otherwise I agree with you. And as someone mentioned yesterday, if you can find a commercial printmaker who you work with often enough that he or she becomes a true collaborator, then that's the best of both those worlds.

Tom R. Halfhill: "I've come to really hate printers. My first was an Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer in 1981 that was a real workhorse. The output was crappy by today's standards, but it was economical to operate and never quit. Every printer I've bought since then has been progressively more expensive to operate and less reliable.

"Epson printers produce high-quality photos, but I gave up on them after clogged heads prematurely killed three printers in close succession.

"An inexpensive HP photo printer in the 1990s (I can't remember the model) produced amazing darkroom-quality B&W prints, and the heads never clogged. But it suddenly died one day, and HP stopped making desktop photo printers, so I couldn't replace it.

"Next I bought a Canon desktop printer that had separate black and gray ink tanks in addition to color. It made good prints but drank like a drunken sailor. Despite light use, it warned me of 'low ink' almost every time I turned it on. And a complete ink set cost about $100.

"Fed up with tiny ink cartridges that needed frequent replacement, I bought a Canon G4200 MegaTank printer. It has huge refillable ink tanks rated for thousands of pages. Although it's not really a photo printer, it makes acceptable B&W prints despite having only one black. Color prints aren't too bad, either, but I'm less picky about them.

"However, this printer died only a week after the one-year warranty expired. Canon replaced it anyway. It's so flimsy that I expect it to die too before the huge ink tanks run dry, but at least I'm no longer harassed with '"low ink' warnings every time I turn it on. Last week the color heads clogged, but a lengthy 'deep cleaning' fixed them—probably at the expense of enough ink to print a few hundred pages. Oh well. I've come to really hate printers."

Dominick Mistretta: "For me there is a certain satisfaction creating prints, whether silver or inkjet. Is it expensive? Yes. But for me it's one of life's little pleasures. I'm looking forward to reading reviews of Epson's new P900."

Michael J. Perini: "Good quality digital printing at home is neither easy nor inexpensive. You also need a certain volume of printing to justify it, because printers need to be used. I have found that as few as one or two prints a week is enough to keep it functioning well. I also followed Mac Holbert's advice to cover my printer, and in the winter I keep a small humidifier in my print studio (an oversized walk-in closet with Munsell gray walls and D50 lighting).

"My current printer is the Epson Sure Color P 5000 which uses 200ml cartridges which seem to last far more than twice as long as the 110ml ones in the 4000. The Gamut of the new HDX ink set can be breathtaking, especially when controlled by the ColorByte ImagePrint RIP. I am able to consistently get prints of very high quality, and what is more, they look exactly the way I want them to look.

"Taken all together, it is anything but cheap. I wish inks were less expensive too, but they are what they are, so the way I handle it is each time I buy a new printer, I also buy a full set of inks so they are always on hand, and then each time one runs out I order another. I have long standardized on Ilford Gold Fiber Silk—a Baryta coated paper that looks and smells like F surface air dried. I buy it in 17" wide rolls, and use Image Print's excellent layout function to arrange prints on the paper.

"Prints are really important to me. I am thrilled to be able to make prints that fully satisfy at home, on demand. The expense simply is what it is, so I focus on the results...which make me happy. When I remember the struggle to try to print color in the darkroom, and basically never getting color prints that fully satisfied me, this seems like a very good deal. But I'd be the first to admit, it doesn't make sense for everyone because if you don't print often, save your money."

Rodolfo Canet Castelló: "If you're fastidious about every detail of your print, home printing is very frustrating and a huge expense of money and time. If you're fastidious about every detail of your print, home printing is the only way. Did I make my point?"

Tom Passin: "Re '...And as someone mentioned yesterday, if you can find a commercial printmaker who you work with often enough that he or she becomes a true collaborator, then that's the best of both those worlds.' My father, who mostly shot with Tri-X push, always used a particular printer in Japan. After many years, the man in Japan retired, and Dad found another printer there. I could tell the difference, and preferred the first one's prints. Then the second printer retired, and Dad stopped taking pictures."

MHMG: "Is home printing too expensive? The answer turns decidedly upon three factors, and wait for it...the cost of ink is not one of them. The three primary factors are 1.) print size, 2.) media choice, and 3.) knowledge/skills of the printmaker. I have done numerous studies, regrettably unpublished to date, to figure out this question of home printing economics. So let me break it down my conclusions for folks as quickly as I can:

1.) Big box stores like Costco, Walmart, etc., and online print service bureaus have bulk buying power on RC photo media pricing, that home printer enthusiasts can't come close to. Even if inks were free, you won't be able to buy cheap RC photo media at a competitive cost per square foot compared to the big photofinishing labs. So, if you are printing smallish size photos, 3x5, 4x6, or 5x7 inch sizes, home printing will never compete on cost due to the cost of the media alone. Start making 8x10, 11x14, 13x19, 17x22 inch size prints, and now you've got a shot at beating the prices you will find for enlargements, but there will still be some crazy poster print deals on line where jobbing the image file out for an enlargement on RC photo media or mass produced canvas printing still favors the big volume photo finishers.

2.) Fine art media...move away from RC photo media to fine-art media like Canson Platine, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl, Moab Entrada Natural Rag 300gsm, etc., and all of a sudden photo labs willing to print your images on these fine art media start routinely charging $20/sq. ft or more depending again on size of the print and number of copies. They may also offer image editing services when you don't want to prepare the files yourself for optimum printing on such specialty papers. Suddenly, the economics tip in favor of home printing because you can buy those media for about $1.50 to $2 per square foot. Add in a dollar or so per square foot for the ink, and the home user costs for ink and media are about $3 per square foot compared to paying a pro lab $20 per sq. foot or more. You can amortize a new printer purchase very quickly when you start considering $20 per square foot of printed output. Thus, the economics tip highly in favor of home printing when you want to print on fine art media. All this said, there's a caveat to the home printing economics story: It depends on the third piece of the puzzle, i.e, your hard-fought, hard-won digital printmaking skills.

3.) So, the third leg of the quality/cost/speed triangle is how skilled you become at print making, and whether you have the patience and interest in skilled printing craftsmanship to slug through an admittedly steep learning curve to get to a point where you can routinely make prints better than you'd get from a pro lab. Learn to visualize the ideal print you want from an image, master color management, master your image editing software, master the quirks of your chosen printer hardware/software driver, etc., and you win on economics when you keep items number 1 and 2 in mind as well. However, I don't want to trivialize this last step. Even the most skilled printmakers among us faced, and continue to face, a steep learning curve with new printers and new media. So, learn the image editing and color management craft, and keep your printer/media/software workflow to a manageable level of choices where some semblance of mastery is possible.

"With these three factors in mind and under control, home printing is indeed both personally rewarding and economical. Just don't blame the cost of the ink as a reason not to dive in because it really isn't a huge factor in this game!

"Item 3 on my list is where the rubber meets the road, IMHO."

christer: "Portraits have always been one of my main fields in photography and I often make A3 size B&W prints. When I started doing prints using my Epson R3000 rather than my wet darkroom, I switched from black backgrounds to white ones. The main reason was ink cost reduction. And I also do post card size test prints before making an A3 print."

Steve Rosenblum: "After having owned a number of what were/are considered to be 'Fine Art' quality inkjet photo printers, and taken a workshop with a nationally known leader in the field, I will say that I agree with those who complain about the difficulties with learning curve and cost.

"However, it strikes me that the main advantage of digital printing may not be something that the home enthusiast avails themselves of very often: producing multiple copies of the same print. Once you have locked down both the image file and the printing workflow you can kick out one copy or hundreds of copies of the same photograph and they will appear identical. After producing the first copy that you deem to be of the quality you want, the next 999 copies are indeed as easy as 'pushing a button' (assuming your printer is working and you have enough money in your bank account for the supplies). This is something that darkroom printers could only have dreamed about. The problem is that 99.9% of the work goes into producing the first acceptable print.

"I, and I suspect many home enthusiasts, rarely have a need for more than a few copies of any print, so I never really get to leverage this main advantage of digital printing."

A Tip for B&W Printmakers

Just a brief tip for you if you're a B&W printmaker, whether you work in a darkroom or with your awesome and beautiful P800 (okay, any pigment printer of your choice).

As you go about life, looking at pictures hither and yon, collect a few examples of B&W pictures you think are really good and that really appeal to you. Throw them in a folder and keep them to look through at the beginning of, or during, any printing session.

These can come from any source you can lay your hands on. Your own work, naturally. Prints by others. My folder even included tearsheets from magazines—an ad from a fashion magazine for one (featuring former top model Paulina Porizkova, which had nothing to do with my attraction to the picture, naturally—it was just the tones, just the tones...). My folder also contained a 1910 platinum portrait and an ancient contact-printed snapshot of my long-deceased aunt as a child with her eyes closed. If there were books I knew of with exquisite reproduction, I would seek out "hurt" or damaged copies or ex-library copies—books destined for the bin—and tear a favorite image or two out. (Desecrating sound books is vandalism and I don't endorse that, of course.) I had, I don't know, maybe two or three dozen pictures in the folder.

Ben Long explains why learning to print B&W can help your color printmaking skills

When I start listening to music in the morning I always start with the volume low. I need to "temper" my ears before I start going for the right volume for the music. Similarly, If I started a printing session by leafing through these various reference pictures, they would "calibrate" my brain to what good B&W looks like, and I'd have an easier time knowing how to zero in on what I wanted for the negatives I was printing.

I can't tell you how many times the following happened: I'd get sort of "lost," confused and flustered maybe, with a picture, because I just didn't know which direction to take it. Time out—ten minutes with the "calibration tool"—my folder of references—just looking, not thinking!—You let your eyes do the work—and it would settle me down, clear my visual "palate," and suddenly as if by magic I'd know where I was going and what I wanted for the picture. Sometimes it would even make me realize I was chasing an effect or going too far the wrong way, and I'd start over from the guide print*.

You calibrate your equipment, right? Your enlarger, your monitor, your trusty P800. Why not also calibrate your most important tools, namely your eyes and brain?

I can't guarantee this will help you, but it works for me and it might for you.

Mike

*The guide print is the first decent whole print you make with the basic parameters all close, before you start any refinements.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "Thank you for this, Mike. Although I didn't disagree with your prior list of common faults found in today's digital B&W images, this post provides a constructive and useful way to avoid them. The 'catch' of course is that it depends on being able to recognize and benchmark against truly excellent prints. On the other hand, if someone has no reference point for what their idea of excellence looks like, their odds of being able to replicate it are slim-to-none."

Mike replies: Right. I'm not telling people what pictures to put in the folder, or suggesting what they ought to look like the ones I would choose. Just "B&W pictures you think are really good and that really appeal to you." And people can always retire one folder and start gathering a whole new one if their tastes change; or retire certain images and replace them one by one.

I have that old folder in the barn someplace. Wish I could find it—it would be interesting to post all the images and discuss them.

The Luminous Landscape Videos

Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape interviewing Ctein in 2004

Well this is a nice surprise. Josh Reichmann, son of our late friend Michael of The Luminous Landscape, has given us permission to make available the two videos of MR's visit to Ctein's San Francisco area darkroom fifteen years ago. This is especially generous of him as L-L is now behind a paywall.

Here's the interview. The part about dye transfer begins about 23:50 of the 32-minute video if you want to skip right to it.

The second one is really the priceless one—it's the only video we know of that shows a dye transfer print actually being made. The first fifteen minutes are somewhat simulated (you can't film in total darkness), but the later part is real-time documentary, showing Ctein making an actual matrix and a print, from start to finish. You really should watch this—it's quite fascinating even if you never set foot in a darkroom or never will again. And it's now a valuable historical record, at least in photo-tech history. Finally, it certainly shows you how involved a process it was to make the rare print or prints you've bought in our sale!

Speaking of which, there are now less than two days left. The basic information is here and you can browse the available images here.

Many and most sincere thanks to Josh. I found it emotional to see and hear his father again—I knew MR for many years. It's the first time I've rewatched one of his videos since his passing. He was a pioneer of photography online and is greatly missed in our little corner of the universe.

Enjoy!

Mike
(Thanks to JR)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Sid: "Fascinating, even spellbinding, videos!"

Rob de Loe: "Best quotation from the second video: 'now we know why not that many people do this anymore.' Yeesh. What an incredible amount of work to make one print. I had no idea. Thanks for posting this Mike."

Mike replies: Incredible, isn't it? Now you can see why I think dye transfer is one of the most amazing processes in photography's history. But unlike some things that are purely difficult, there was a reason for going through all that work: the results were inimitable, especially as regards maximum black and color purity.

However, my second most favorite color process is pigment inkjet. A well-made pigment inkjet print can be really beautiful. It is a wonderful medium too.

...And not quite as difficult, either.  :-)  But one of the salient comments Ctein made in the video is when he talked about the prejudice people have that inkjet printing is just "pressing a button and letting the computer do it." He's right that that's the same prejudice that people leveled against photography itself in the beginning. Inkjet printing is a skill too, and takes knowledge as well as judgement.

As an aside, note also in the videos that Ctein doesn't use junk words and fillers when he speaks. You won't hear him say "um" and "ahh" very often, if at all. And he doesn't use filler phrases like "you know" (unless he really means it) or "know what I'm saying" or "like" or "stuff like that"...or stuff like that. Sometimes he will pause and actually sigh, but he's silent—he doesn't fill his silences with junk. Very unusual manner of speaking these days. No wonder he dictates instead of typing.

Kenneth G James: "Wow! Watched the videos, they are great! Thanks Mike, Thanks Josh."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I actually have a DVD of that second video (from a former LuLa subscription purchase) that I keep near my desk as a greatest-hits reference. I’ve not only watched several times myself but I’ve played it for others. Several years ago I even played it for a lunchtime group of photo curators and conservation interns at a major museum. It’s a wonderfully educational video, a genuine classic."

Mike replies: Genuine classic...I thought the very same thing, Ken, rewatching it last night.

[A different] Mike: "As amazing as the process is to watch—and it really is—it's even wilder to think about how the idea came to be in the first place. Wow."

MHMG: "Some fifteen years later, I listen with interest to Ctein's comments and concerns about print permanence in the first video. Ctein is entirely spot on with some of his concerns about accelerated aging test methods as it was practiced at the time. We have now learned something about modern inkjet prints that weren't predicted by those accelerated aging methods practiced at that time. A new understanding of inkjet print longevity has indeed been determined both by refinements in accelerated test methods and actual observations in real world anecdotal reports at this point in time now that inkjet printing is a much more mature print process. I take comfort that both 'real world' anecdotal evidence of aging issues with modern media and more recent accelerated testing protocols with improved methodologies for these media are now leading to a better understanding of print permanence. The role of optical brighteners and titanium dioxide whitening pigments in modern media, for example, play a more significant role than we knew at the time Michael Reichmann interviewed Ctein in the these videos. Progress is progress!"

David Lee: "Thanks for the videos Mike. I watched the printing process three times already and shared it twice."

Eamon Hickey: "An incredible treat to watch these videos, especially the printing demo. Thanks to all who thought to make it and now made it available for us to see. In addition to being a master printer, Ctein is a master explainer, a skill that is probably as rare and valuable (in the benefit-to-the-rest-of-us sense) as his darkroom skills. A real pleasure to hear and see him describe his work."

Dye Transfer and Me, Part II

(Part 2 of an Uncertain Number)

Figure 1 (see text)

Words and photos by Ctein

As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'm writing several columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Back to our story...

When we last left our intrepid hero it was 1975 and he was about to attempt to scale mountains that he imagined were molehills (okay, maybe not so intrepid, not so heroic). As I said, I had misconceptions.

Why bother? Dye transfer had two major advantages over other processes: control and inherent quality. It was like having Photoshop in the darkroom. You had multiple tools for controlling curve shape, both the overall grayscale curve shape and the individual RGB color curves.

You could change the contrast, saturation, and overall print density range independently. You could make these adjustments to the overall print or to the individual primary colors. There were always several paths to each aesthetic end; for instance there were three different ways to increase contrast that had different effects on saturation and print density range. There are, in fact, so many different ways to control the print appearance that I don't believe anyone has ever entirely mastered the process. I certainly reject the term "master" for myself. There is just no end to the learning curve.

I photographed Figure 1 at a considerable distance, so normal light scattering in the air made washed out the shadows and made them progressively more blue. Printed conventionally, there is no fix for this. With dye transfer, I fixed the white point to keep it neutral but increased the green contrast (magenta dye) a little and the blue contrast (yellow) a lot. That eliminated the atmospheric scattering problem.

Dye transfer's inherent color fidelity and gamut are unsurpassed. Dye transfer prints can have a maximum density approaching 3.0. No other printing process, analog or digital, can reach that level of density and saturation. That gives dye transfer prints an extremely large color gamut.

Even more important, dye transfer's dyes have high color accuracy, especially the yellow, which is comparable to what you'd see in a digital printer. Chromogenic yellow has a strong magenta component—it looks more like "Kodak box" yellow. In a conventional color print, distinct hues between orange and yellow blend into the same shade of yellow-orange. When I printed Figure 2 on chromogenic paper, it was a uniform orangeish-tan, almost monochrome. The dye print distinguishes the yellows, tans, and oranges.

Figure 2

Worse, chromogenic papers can't produce a vivid green. That poor yellow inevitably introduces a magenta component, which is the complement of green, muting it. I printed the illustration in the previous column as one of my very early dye transfers because a chromogenic print clobbered the delicate yellow-greens.

Dye transfer originally had better light-fading and dark-keeping characteristics than any other commercial process. The light stability of chromogenic and Cibachrome prints caught up, but dye transfer is much superior when it comes to dark storage. A dye transfer print in the dark at room temperature has a projected life of 300 years. I am confident in that number. Dye transfer materials did not change significantly over half a century and Kodak regularly measured reference prints that had been kept in the dark. There's 50 years worth of data that says that their accelerated tests are accurate. No other material has been around long enough to give us that sort of real-world confidence.

Now you know why I wanted to make, as Charlie put it, "some good prints." In 1975, I had the will and the money. The means came next. The easy part was ordering boxes of chemicals, dyes, paper, and Pan Matrix Film. It was an awful lot of money. A single box of 25 sheets of 10x12-inch Pan Matrix Film (for making 8x10 prints) ran about $300 (in current bucks). That'll make a maximum of eight prints, assuming nothing goes wrong and no do-overs. Reality was often less kind. Film for 16x20 prints? Three times that much. 11x14 paper? $4/sheet.

Equipment came cheaper. Dye transfer requires laying down the three primary colors separately and in perfect register on a sheet of receiving paper, using "pin registration." It's very low-tech and surprisingly precise. I wasn't sure I could afford a proper register punch (those supplies were really expensive), but I had a good three-hole punch. I punched a sheet of film, gave it to a friend who had a lathe, and he cut two sets of hex-head screws down to exactly match the holes in the punched sheet. I took one set, mounted them on a thin sheet of wood using the punched film to get them aligned exactly, and attached the pin assembly to the end of a vacuum exposure easel that I built out of Masonite, two by fours, and a spare vacuum cleaner. I saved myself hundreds of dollars.

Well, guess what—that primitive vacuum register exposure easel worked beautifully for my entire dye transfer printing career. A few years later I replaced my three hole punch with a real used (and affordable!) Kodak Register Punch and my custom-cut pins with a Condit Manufacturing pin strip (also affordable). That was it for the next 35 years.

My original register transfer easel was a horrible kludge of wood, aluminum, brass hinges and masonite. It was cheap. It worked—after a fashion. It gave me good alignment on the transfers, but it was a royal pain to use. As soon as I switched to Condit pin strips, I abandoned it for a much more elegant design, a simple sheet of heavy plate glass with the pin stripped glued to one end. Like the exposure easel, it served me well for the rest of my career.

There were a bunch of other equipment problems to address. I've mentioned I had some misconceptions about dye transfer. One of the big ones was that, knowing that dye transfer prints were "better" than any other kind of commercially available print, I assumed that they were as good or better in every respect. Specifically, that dye transfer prints would be as precisely reproducible as conventional color prints and come out as clean and flaw-free, with nice sharp framing and white borders.

False! But not knowing any better (I still hadn't seen a dye transfer print) I strove for that. Getting clean edges on the image area was a trial. In ordinary printing a hinged four-bladed paper easel overlays the print paper and crops the photograph exactly where you want. I suppose one could engineer a four-bladed pin registration easel that would ensure that those blades overlaid each sheet of Pan Matrix Film in exactly the same position. I wouldn't have been able to afford it if they had.

After some trial and considerable error, I hit upon the idea of masking the edges of my negatives directly, using strips of opaque metallic tape to define the crop. It worked—also, after a fashion. It never produced super-sharp nor super-straight edges. Geometric imperfections in my laying of the tape were magnified by the enlargement factor.

Eventually I figured out a better approach that did produce the super-crisp edges I longed for. I cut out full-size masks from opaque sheet film and punched the end so that I could register them on the exposure easel. After I installed a sheet of Pan Matrix Film on the easel and turned on the vacuum, I laid to the mask down on top. You can tell the photographs I printed in the very early years from later ones by the sloppy borders—they got a lot better once I surmounted that learning curve.

By the end of 1975, I was ready to start working. Learning how to develop Pan Matrix Film, not easy! I had to develop three sheets of large, un-hardened emulsion uniformly and to exactly the same degree, by interleaving them in a tray of developer in pitch darkness (panchromatic, remember?) with a total development time of only two minutes. Compared to that, learning to dye, rinse, and roll prints was relatively easy.

I learned all the steps in Kodak's magnificent 24-page pamphlet and, truthfully, it wasn't all that hard. Just one small problem.

After six months, I'd burnt through all the money from Charlie's first check and was into my second, and I was still getting lousy prints. Development was hit or miss and I couldn't get a complete and clean transfer, where all the dye in the matrix migrated over to the print paper like it was supposed to. Something was wrong and I didn't know what. In June 1976, I penned a letter to one Mr. Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak that began as follows:

Dear Mr. McLaughlin—

I was given your name by the local Kodak representative as one to contact on questions about the dye transfer process. I began teaching myself the technique about six months ago—while I have most of the aspects under control, a few problems pop up with annoying frequency....

I had no idea what kind of response, if any I would get. I had never tried writing to a major company like Kodak before, and I had no faith that a nobody like me (yes, then I was a nobody, no publishing credentials, nada) would get anything more than a boilerplate "thank you for your interest in our product..." response.

My lack of faith was badly misplaced.

...Which is where we will pick up with the next thrilling installment!

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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hugh crawford: "I always thought those funky edges of the image that revealed the separate layers of the image were pretty neat. Well not literally neat but a cool example of letting the process show."

William Schneider: "At Ohio University a long time ago, there was a small room set up with equipment required for dye transfer. Being a daunting process, only a handful of students ever attempted it. One professor there, Arnold Gassan, worked with the process. In that room, I recall colorful stains on the countertop, floor and walls. I suspect that this could be a very messy process. Perhaps tie-dye shirts were an unintended badge of honor for practitioners."

Ctein replies: Dear Hugh, You're not wrong. It's just that I grew up with a different aesthetic around photographic prints. Not "fine art" prints like serigraphs or lithographs, which I also did—there, unfinished edges were part of the expected look. Heh, no one ever required artists to be consistent. From a commercial point of view, all my clients wanted those clean edges. Over my entire career, I didn't have one ask, "Can you do unregistered edges for me?" Interestingly, unfinished edges are still part of the platinum print "look," where practitioners have to prepare and brush the light-sensitive emulsion onto raw paper stock. The aesthetics of the brushstrokes at the edge of the image area are an important of the quality of the print.

Dear William, Oh yeah, a very good way to turn new (dress) clothes into old (work) clothes—wear them in the darkroom. Shoes, too. Having dilute acetic acid repeatedly dripped on them doesn't leave them very happy.

Fred: "Wow. As a former mediocre (at best) black-and-white printer I am very fascinated with this series. It feels to me like 'inside baseball' at its best. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment."

More Artificial Common Sense: Topaz Labs GigaPixel AI

Written and illustrated by Ctein

I am, for the most part, not a fan of "sharpening for output" nor of upsampling programs. Sharpening for output has, for me, translated into harsh, unrealistic edges and a degradation of what I would (imprecisely) call photographic quality. It also seems to be fundamentally misapplied—the times when I do need sharpening output are when I'm printing very small, not very large, as the printer rendering algorithms tend to suppress very fine, low-contrast detail.

As for upsampling, I gave that a thorough inspection about a dozen years back in these very pages:

It's Bigger, But Is It Better?

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part II

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part III

The takeaway, if all that is seriously longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] is that the improvements were modest, nothing was superior under all circumstances, and Photoshop's built-in resizing algorithms worked, on average, as well as anything else. For the heck of it, I checked out the notion that upsampling to a printer's native resolution (360 or 720 PPI in the case of Epson; other manufacturers may be different) produced a higher quality print then letting the printer's driver handle this (which it does behind the scenes when you hand it something of a different PPI). It didn't.

In the years since then third-party programs have improved, but so has Photoshop. I haven't been induced to change my practices.

Except—a few years back, I watched a conversation between Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. Jeff, printing from Lightroom to an Epson 3880 printer, found that files upsampled from their native resolution to 360 or 720 PPI in Lightroom printed out distinctly more sharply than those upsampled by the Epson print driver.

Jeff noted that that didn't mean that another program (or printer) would yield the same results. I use Photoshop, not Lightroom. They are two different products with two different development teams, so they may or may not share the same upsampling code.

But…Jeff is another one of those Great Printing Experts, and 95% of the time we're in agreement (especially around the recommended settings for the Epson 3880 printer to produce the very best quality). I'm not going to ignore his four-year-old results in favor of my twelve, nuh uh. I needed to test out his assertion on my P800 printer, with Photoshop.

Big surprise (not), Jeff turned out to be right. A dozen years ago, I was probably right, but a dozen years is forever in the digital technology world. It pays to occasionally recheck one's beliefs.

Photographs upsampled in Photoshop to my printer's native resolution look distinctly better than those left to the printer's ministrations. Better and cleaner fine detail, more nicely delineated edges.

Not all photographs benefit from this. In particular, for those where some degree of grain/noise is an integral part of the image (sometimes true in my color work, more often true in my black and white infrared), improving the acuteness of a print didn't make it better, as it also enhanced that grain structure, which had been tuned to just where I wanted it. Most of the time, though, I followed Jeff's advice and was much pleased with the improved quality. And I still avoided third-party upsampling programs.

Then Topaz Labs came out with GigaPixel AI, the second of their machine-learning-trained tools. The first had been AI Clear, which had mightily impressed me with its ability to sort out detail from garbage, so I wanted to see what this pony's tricks were like. The samples on their website looked unbelievably good, even taking into account that they were cherry-picked, because advertising.

I downloaded the program and handed it a modest task, taking what was already a very detailed and sharp photograph and upsampling it to my printer's native resolution for a 17x22-inch print (about a 1.5X enlargement) with GigaPixel AI.

GigaPixel AI was effin' amazin'. I'm talking markedly better rendering of fine detail, both at strong edges and in subtle fine gradations, along with finer grain/noise (and less of it). All of this without artifacts or suppression of delicate tonalities! The results looked entirely natural and much better than Photoshop's upsampling. Below are sections from the Photoshop (figure 1) and GigaPixel (figure 2) renderings, at 100% if you click through to the standalone images. [Bear in mind that TOP's TypePad interface softens illustrations somewhat. —Ed.]

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

I looked at 17x22" prints from the non-upsampled, Photoshop-upsampled and GigaPixel AI-upsampled files, and there was a clear improvement with each step. In fact, the difference between Photoshop and GigaPixel was substantially greater than between no upsampling and Photoshop.

GigaPixel doesn't improve the prints from every single one of my photographs. Only about 75% of them. Sometimes the improvement is nothing more than finer grain/noise, where GigaPixel has subdivided blobby grains into smaller discrete ones.

At other times the improvements do look unbelievable. Take a look at figures 3 (Photoshop) and 4 (GigaPixel AI). Look at the improvement in both fine detail and noise, compared to the original file, which you're not even seeing because I can't figure out how to portray it at the same scale without upsampling. It's about what I'd expect going from a 20-megapixel camera to a 30–35 megapixel one.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

GigaPixel AI is a standalone program. It will accept a variety of input formats and will output JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. For fine printing you're going to want the 16-bit TIFF output, of course. I use GigaPixel AI last in my printing workflow, after I've done all my local corrections and pixel fiddling. I duplicate the Photoshop file, save it as a TIFF, and run that through GigaPixel AI. That way I preserve my options for resizing to my printer's native resolution, no matter what size I decide I'm going to print at.

GigaPixel AI occasionally blows up, sometimes globally, sometimes just in one small part of the picture. Not often, but it happens. Machine-learning systems can get very weird notions in their silicon noggins. When it's just some small bit of the photograph that's gone off the rails I resize the Photoshop file to the same dimensions as the GigaPixel TIFF, and paste that TIFF in a new image layer on the file. That makes it easy to do a comparison between the renderings, just switching that layer on and off. Sometimes I throw away the GigaPixel AI rendering or mask it so I can hide the parts where GigaPixel AI went wonky. This is not a frequent occurrence. Most of the time, GigaPixel AI wins with no fiddling.

What's the downside? You may not be able to run GigaPixel AI on your current system. GigaPixel AI demands substantial system requirements. GigaPixel AI performs an insane number of calculations while it does its image analysis. It can commandeer your GPU, if you choose that option, and it'll still take minutes to render an image. I think we're talking millions of calculations per pixel, tens of teraflops total, to upsample a single photograph.

As is typical for Topaz Labs, Gigapixel has a 30-day fully-functional free trial, so you don't have to spend $99.99 to decide if it's worth it to you.

Topaz Labs sends me the stuff for free, but there's no question that I'd pay whatever they charge for this program. It's a four-star wonder.

Ctein

UPDATE Wednesday afternoon: Ctein wrote a reply to several commenters. Because not all the comments he responded to are among the "Featured" ones, I published his reply with the rest of the comments in the Comments section. To get to the full Comments section of this or any post, click on "Comments ([number])" at the bottom of the footer of every post. —Ed.

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 344th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Michael Elenko: "I was sold on GigaPixel AI somewhat out of desperation earlier this spring. I was curating a group exhibition and during the hanging, one print just didn't meet my standards for sharpness. I learned that the print originated from an iPhone 8, and that a friend of the artist attempted to upscale it to meet our print size requirements by using a Photoshop algorithm. I then got involved, tried other Photoshop algorithms as well as Lightroom's approach (which I usually favor), and was not satisfied. I then remembered reading about GigaPixel AI, downloaded a trial, and used it on the image file. The result was revelatory, and just in time for the exhibition opening. I've since purchased the product and am revisiting old-but-good work from 15 years ago."

Print Exchanges

Jayanand Govindaraj wrote: "The simplest way to feed this hunger to see prints regularly is to take part in print exchanges—I have been doing so, every month, for the past 15 years, despite living in India. It started with only B&W on digital printers, which was a voodoo-like art worth learning in 2004 when I started, but nowadays encompasses both B&W and colour. The other advantage, of course, is that you effortlessly build up a print collection."

David Lee wrote: "I was a member of the APUG forum. Every now and then they would organize a postcard exchange. You could sign up for either 20 or 50 exchanges as far as I remember. You would have to print, in your darkroom, 20 or 50 postcard-sized photographs and then send them in the mail to the 20 or 50 people you were given on a list. Then, you would receive, in the mail, 20 or 50 black and white darkroom prints, postcard or 5x7's.

"It was amazing. Once, my neighbour got one of them by mistake and when she brought it to me, she told me how excited she was, thinking that she got a postcard! Maybe we can do something like this, Mike. My darkroom is back in Mexico and now I live in the middle east, but I can still manage to make some nice digital prints and they still have postal stamps around here."

Rodolfo Canet Castelló wrote: "One of the most exciting activities I did with other members of some photographic forum was a print exchange: within quite relaxed rules on size and format, every month we posted a print to a member and got another from a different one. It was a mixed bag: most times I didn’t get something so much worked on and cared for as I had sent, but several times I got prints I treasure and, once, a photo that truly resonated with my soul and got me close to tears. Curiously enough, when I proposed to change the rules to make public the senders and receivers before posting, so making it possible to choose the picture from our online galleries, everyone preferred to keep it secret and, therefore, random. Ah, the thrill of expectation!"

Mike comments: Very interesting—and how great that would be. The only thing I've ever participated in that came close to that was an email music group called C60Crew, semi-ironically named after the code for an hour-long cassette tape and the slang word for "gang" that prevailed at that time. There were six or eight members, and every month one person, in turn, sent out a mixed tape of music to all the others. Eventually the tapes became CDs, and then it sort of atrophied because we had gotten to know each other's musical tastes so well. It survives today (probably 25 years on) on Mixcloud, where the leader of the old group, my ex-dj friend KK, regularly posts mixes of new, obscure, experimental, esoteric music and electronica under the old name. The latest one is called "She's So Heavy" and features a black-and-white portrait of a young Gina Lollobrigida on the cover. [UPDATE: Sophia Loren? I'm not up on Italian bombshells of my parents' generation, and the Internet is not very good at history.] (Also, check out the cartoon on the cover of "That Falling Feeling"—I keep laughing at that.)

I don't think I could handle a print exchange, personally. Everyone has their crosses to bear, and I'm not complaining, but my personal ones are a lack of energy and a distinct, though not quite crippling, lack of organizing aptitude, ability, and skill. Keeping a small house passably neat and decently organized is at the limit of my capabilities. My computer is an appalling mess—if it were physical instead of virtual, it would be the equivalent of that woman I saw on A&E's "Hoarders" whose husband had bought three houses for her, one after the other. She had relentlessly filled each house with stuff until the couple had to buy the house next door and move into that. (The husband approached the show's producers in extremis because the third house had become too jammed with junk to move around in and he couldn't afford a fourth mortgage.) (By the way, "Hoarders" is a show which makes sport of torturing people with mental illness, so I stopped watching it. Hoarders are just sick, that's all. Torturing sick people doesn't help them.) (Should I count digressions as my third weakness?)

Back to the subject: I don't think I'm personally capable of helping readers organize print exchanges, because I'm too, like I told you, disorganized. And if I were to participate in one I'd just be the FU who messed up the system for the others. But it's a great idea and if anyone has any ideas as to how I might help connect readers who want to form groups, chime in below.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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hugh crawford: "Gina or Sophia? I’d go with Sophia, but that’s definitely taken on the Staten Island ferry. Pro tip: if you want to do an iconic celebrity in NYC photo, not have anyone in the background or get bothered much by tourists, spend about an hour with your subject on a pleasant cruise past the Statue of Liberty and other interesting backgrounds to include. And everyone has at least one crazy only-in-New-York story to tell. And it’s free! I even think there is still a bar on board."

Mike in R. Colorado: "Prints are great, no question about that, but sharing photographs is also worthwhile. I get together monthly—it just happens to be this evening!—with a group. We meet at a pub. Some of us are mostly film, some mostly digital as far as cameras. Most, but not all of are sharing is via digital files. Twenty or fewer from each person are projected as a 20-second timed slide show. There's not much time to talk about them as the photos go by, but sometimes we stop it and talk for a bit, and we all usually have more to say at the end of each person's presentation. Occasionally a few of us bring prints that we set out on a table and all gather around. It's not a competition, or even a review, it's just sharing. Lots of fun."

Roberto Carlin: "Definitively Sofia Loren And by the way did you know that Gina Lollobrigida is also a photographer?"

Mike replies: I did not. Thanks.

Prints!

Sometimes I think I've landed in the wrong business. I used to go far out of my way to see photographs, which meant physical prints. I mean literally—I'd drive to another city to see a show.

Sometimes, now, readers send me prints. David Francis sent me a print. It's small, a card, but it's still lovely. The picture, called Swan Gourd #2, is beautifully simple, and the print is gorgeous. I've actually considered framing it! I still might, except I have a wee little house and no room for everything. His judgement was just right. I've looked at it a lot.

Marcelo Guarini sent me a print, of his picture in this post. It's so different than the JPEG online...it has wonderful presence. Again, I think he got it just right—his judgement was bang on. His was a gift, after I offered to buy a print from him. (Thank you, Marcelo.) Such a pleasure to see.

Others have sent me prints too—don't think I don't appreciate them just because I haven't mentioned everyone here. I do. I look at everything. I read everything that comes in, too. I end up looking at some prints a lot.

...Just so you can get a rough idea. But this is like seeing
a shadow. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

I tell ya, I have a hunger to see prints. It's one disadvantage of living so far out in the country, in reach of only a few museums. I used to live in DC, and what a pleasure that was—museums all over the place, free for walking into. I'm being honest: I remember prints I saw thirty years ago, and twenty, and ten. The occasions—the experience of viewing them—are events for me.

I like JPEGs too, I guess. But it's sorta like wanting to see people and seeing only their shadows. Just not quite the same thing. Well, actually JPEGs can be very nice too.

I'm just going to have to work out a way to see more prints. Do you enjoy prints? To me they're a great pleasure.

Mike
(Thanks to David, Marcelo, and many others)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Michael Trupiano: "My work is not done until the physical object, a print, exists."

Jeff: "I’ve traveled not just locally, but to other countries to see both paintings and photo prints. Truly one of my joys in life (thanks, Mom and Dad, for appreciating art). And one of my decision criteria for home locations (even when considering job opportunities before retirement) has been proximity to visual arts.

"That joy eventually translated into collecting vintage prints (and photo books) in the '80s. The process introduced me to dealers, curators, and others, and opened my eyes to even more print-viewing opportunities. One such method has been to call the photography department curator at various museums to arrange for private viewings of prints that rarely if ever get exhibited, but reside in collections. On slower days, these folks are sometimes thrilled to be able to share the experience.

"Like you, many prints stick in my mind seemingly forever. Frustratingly so at times when I’ve missed an opportunity to buy a print well before the price has soared. I related one such story here regarding a Walker Evans' print at a DC AIPAD show.

"Not surprisingly, my own photography is grounded on a print-worthy picture as the ultimate goal (and maybe a book some day). That required my building four darkrooms as I moved across country for job opportunities. Now retired, having gone fully digital, the goal remains the same. My house no longer requires darkroom space, but still needs room for the printer and workspace/tools for matting, framing and supplies.

"Too bad that so many people today haven’t ever seen a gorgeous print, well displayed, let alone done their own printing."

Speed: "Mike wrote, 'I used to live in DC, and what a pleasure that was—museums all over the place, free for walking into.'

"I grew up and still live in Cleveland, Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie in the US Midwest. Historically Cleveland was a manufacturing city and world headquarters for industrial companies such as Standard Oil, Republic Steel, White Motors and the C&O Railroad. Fortunately, some of the wealth those companies created was used to build a great art museum (The Cleveland Museum of Art), a great orchestra (The Cleveland Orchestra) and other enduring public works.

"I was spoiled. In grade school we visited the art museum once or twice a year and, because we were immature boys, we enjoyed only the Armor Court where chain mail, armor, swords and axes were displayed. The works of Michelangelo, Degas and Picasso meant nothing.

"Decades later I was in Portland, Oregon on business and visited their art museum. I walked through the whole building in less than 20 minutes and wondered where the rest of it was hidden. How fortunate we were in Cleveland to have a great museum that we could visit any time. For free.

"And how fortunate for us that the scions of our industrial era had donated so much of their wealth to make Cleveland a better place to live.

"I keep a postcard reproduction of Edgar Degas’ Frieze of Dancers on my desk. It was my favorite—after the armor.

"The museum has a large collection of photographs."

Stan B.: "One of the great joys in my 'photographic life' to this date was going to Light Gallery at 724 Fifth Avenue in the 'seventies. Being there amidst its white walls with some of the most beautiful prints one could possibly see anywhere was like appreciating photography in the afterlife...."

Mike replies: Light Gallery was legendary.

JohnW: "I enjoy prints immensely! I belong to three prints-only photo groups, so I get a regular fix, and there are 13 prints hanging in my apartment—six colour and seven B&W. I also do my own printing."

Andrew Molitor: "I have mulled over this at, probably, far too great length. It turns out that I have almost the opposite position; prints do very little for me. I mean, I appreciate the physicality and the different way of accessing the picture, but I don't see the print as somehow better. I too have gone to great lengths to see a collection of prints stuck on a wall. But it's not the print as such, that attracts me. (Yes, I have seen very good prints, plenty of them. I have seen very good prints of pictures I am also very familiar with as small JPEGs.) My conclusion is that I am far more driven by the content, the subject matter, than by the character of the image itself than many other photography types. I simply don't care much about the tonality, the color, or even very much about the arrangement of line and form. I am interested in the guy in the picture, the place, the pepper, the mountain. Horses for courses!"

Ram: "Just yesterday I drove three hours each way from Austin to Houston to see the fashion photography exhibit Icons of Style at the Museum of Fine Arts. Totally agree with you, the experience of seeing real gelatin silver prints on display, like those of Penn, Avedon, Weber, Horst, Beaton, et al., was thrilling."

Marcelo Guarini: "If it says something, I spend quite a bit more money in printing materials (printer, paper, inks, etc.) than in photo equipment (cameras, lenses, SD cards, tripods, lights, etc.). Both take a considerable bite of my income, but it keeps me alive. I would love to visit more photo exhibits, but where I live, it is very uncommon to have one on hand. When I visit my sister in Tucson, I spend half the time in the Center for Creative Photography."

David Francis: "Mike, Thanks for your comments on my picture. My printing resources are limited (just an old Canon MP990) and my wall space is close to zero, so cards are an attractive option for me. They may not be fine art quality, but you can often get surprisingly good results. Photo books are my other option for displaying prints. I prefer making my own prints and spiral binding them. Well-produced books are actually my favourite medium for viewing photographs."

The Very Very Very Best Backup...

...Is still a box of prints! (Or a "few-of-a-kind" custom book like a Blurb book.)

Okay, maybe not the best backup but the best archive.

I had planned to make this point again two days ago (bringing us around full circle in recent discussions here on TOP), when this comment came in from David L. night before last:

"My engineering career was as a hard drive engineer and in server storage. My advice—make prints."

(That's his whole comment.) 

Ending up with prints is still a good idea, even though I know most people don't do it.

It's always been a good idea to think of a photograph in digital form as a transitory state—a state between the taking of the picture and the final object—a print, or printed book, or whatever the final creation might be.

Of course we do want to have a working archive—our shooting in mass unprocessed form—so that we can go back and print old files, reconsider our editing choices, or bring together different groups or pairings or whatever. It's the raw material for our ongoing creative activities as photographers.

A well-made print (pigment inks on stable paper) is a write-once, set-and-forget medium. It has to be physically protected, sure, but that's a different problem, and one I've written about elsewhere.

Ultimately nothing is permanent—but it's a good idea to remind ourselves every now and then that "backup" of the material we work from is just a fluid working state, and not, in itself, a final achievement.

(See what I do for you? I just said with 264 words what David L. said better with 17. Heh!)

Mike
(Thanks to all of you who helped me with my backup strategy)

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Everything must fade away

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Tim Smith: "In my 20s I worked in a print darkroom for several years. We entered into a contract with Yale to make contact prints of their extensive collection of glass negatives. Aside from the fact that they were stunning and technically amazing, it strikes me that as long as they haven't been smashed or destroyed, you could do the very same thing today. I fear that the evolution of digital may someday make even the best drives obsolete or at least very difficult to recover. I can't even remember all the storage devices/methods that have come and gone, like: SCSI tape drives, ZIP drives, CD-RW, etc.

"So yeah, prints."

11x14" Print

Andrew wrote in the Comments: "Re 'Somewhere out in the barn I have a motion-blurred snapshot of John Gossage in the lovely garden-level dining room of Julie Pratt's mansion holding that print, the first one Robert Frank ever sold.' Dig it out and let's see it!"

I tried. I tromped out to the barn and lugged in several boxes of prints, but I didn't find the one I was looking for.

Here's another shot from the same NYC trip, though. John Gossage is standing in an art installation on the roof of a multi-floor gallery, which I believe was in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan. I thought I had posted this on TOP before, but I can't find it so maybe I didn't.

Did you know that snow evaporates even when the temperature is below freezing? The name of artist and gallery have similarly evaporated from my memory. [UPDATE: See Enrique de la Huelga's comment below.]

See through the print
By the way, this is very typical of the darkroom prints I made for years...I found a whole bunch of them in the barn. I shot with Tri-X and made finished prints on 11x14" paper, usually in one of three sizes. My main size was 7x10.5"—it seemed smallish on the sheet but what I liked about it was that it broke the visual expectation of a standard 8x10" print. (Not many people have that visual expectation in their mind's eye any more, but I was a photo teacher, and as a photo teacher you see—I should say saw—an awful lot of 8x10" prints.) This was the larger size, 13" wide in the long dimension, and then I also sometimes printed at 5x7.5.

I tried 2 1/4 for a while and printed on 16x20" paper, but it seemed like too much. I didn't know what I was going to do with all those big prints. Many of those are lost, because an ex-girlfriend wouldn't return them. So I went back to 35mm on 11x14".

I was a careful (sometimes obsessively careful) craftsman in the darkroom, but I didn't want the prints to call attention to themselves. My idea was that I wanted people to see through the print to the picture, if ye ken. I printed everything with the black line of the clear film edge. And by the way, that wasn't really because of any notion about purity or whatever; it was just so all the prints would look coherent when exhibited together. Plus I like the look.

For some reason I remember the lens I used for virtually every film picture I ever took. I never try to; I just do. It's more or less involuntary. This was taken with my Leica "Pre-ASPH" 35mm Summicron. It was a great lens but it was built poorly. The coating on the aperture blades flaked off and collected right in the center of the lens on the inner elements. It was unnoticeable in pictures at first but gradually, as it got worse, it started to cut the contrast of the lens.

If I ever find that snapshot of John holding the Robert Frank print—or when I find it, because everything shows up again sooner or later—I'll post it.

The future good old days
If I ever retire, I'll probably go back to shooting with a film Leica, except I'll probably shoot XP2 and find someone else to develop and proof it (I can do this because in my retirement I'm comfortably wealthy; it's all fantasy anyway so I might as well imagine it that way). And I'll make my enlargements on RC paper.

I'm pretty surprised by this given all the furor about RC print permanence when I was young, but a whole lot of my RC workprints, at least the ones printed on Ilford RC papers, look just as fresh right now as the day I printed them. I don't see any deterioration at all. Many of those were made when I was in art school in 1982–85 and in the decade and a half that followed—I lost my last darkroom in 2000—so they're between 17 and 36 years old now.

If retirement ever comes, though, I'll no doubt have to try every 35mm and 40mm Leica M mount lens there is.  :-)

Mike

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Enrique de la Huelga: "DIA Art Foundation Dan Graham Rooftop Urban Park Project: Two Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube, 1981-91."

Charlie Pratt's Prints

I've told this story before I'm sure, but Lord knows where.

Many years ago, the photographer John Gossage helped organize a show of photographs by Charles Pratt at the Corcoran Gallery. Charlie, who had died of a heart attack at his gym four years earlier at the age of 50, had been the scion of a wealthy industrialist family. It turned out that John had other connections with the Pratt family, which included helping Charlie's widow Julie publish several books of Charlie's photography. Julie was an actress—I believe she acted using her maiden name, Julie Follansbee. She died at 88 as Julie Follansbee-Pratt Shattuck. She acted in the movie Regarding Henry and in episodes of  Law & Order among other things. Charlie was primarily a photographer of Maine and its coast, and published Here On the Island during his lifetime, a book that has long been valued by collectors of "all things Maine."

Julie had also endowed a substantial but under-the-radar photography prize which John helped her to administrate—I'm not sure if it still exists, but I suspect not—and on one occasion I got to go with John on a friendly business visit to Julie in her Upper East Side townhouse in New York City. Together he and I explored Charlie's darkroom, which Julie had closed the door to but left intact. Julie herself was a lively, radiant woman, attractive, with white hair, who exuded a gentle, caring sort of spirit. Charlie, it turned out, had quietly sponsored many of the photographers he believed in—I'm not sure how, entirely, but in many cases by buying prints.

He bought the first print that Robert Frank ever sold, for instance, and he helped W. Eugene Smith by buying Gene's prints. Charlie had an East Street Gallery print washer in his darkroom—it was the first of the "archival" print washers from the early days of archival processing, when not much was known yet about print permanence and LE (life expectancy).

And, unfortunately, that was reflected in the way some of Charlie's treasured prints were hung in the dining room of the home. All the prints in the dining room were glued to same-sized Masonite rectangles and varnished on the front, with a smaller 1x2" frame stuck to the back for the hanging wire and so the print "floated" off the surface of the wall.

Looked nice. But that's about the opposite of archival treatment! Did the method of framing "ruin" the prints? I suppose so. I'm sure it had an impact on their value. But few people really knew any better in the early 1970s. (Charlie Pratt died in 1976.) Of course, the prints hanging on the wall were only a small part of Charlie's collection.

Here's what the New York Times said of Charlie Pratt's own prints in the Corcoran show at the time: "They have an authoritative presence that, for all their echoes of Minor White, Eliot Porter and Paul Caponigro, seems unique and original. Pratt was a masterful printer in black and white, and used this skill with precision and restraint, not bombast. The color prints on display are equally successful, showing Pratt's painterly knack for limiting each composition to two or three syncopated hues." Their quiet gentleness was what I liked about them. He photographed with a Pentax 6x7 and made very small prints.

On that day in New York, I had with me my Leica M6 and a 35mm Summicron loaded with Ilford XP-2, and the room was illuminated only by the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the leafy trees of the garden, through what I remember as French doors. Somewhere out in the barn I have a motion-blurred snapshot of John Gossage in the lovely garden-level dining room of Julie Pratt's mansion holding that print, the first one Robert Frank ever sold. Compromised by a method of presentation we no longer would favor, of course. But also a talisman of Charlie Pratt's kindness and support for the artists, and the art, he loved.

Mike
(Thanks to John G.)

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How Do You Add Info?

Malcolm Myers (among others) asked: "How does one add comments to a physical print? Do you perhaps copy a 9x6 print into Photoshop, add some comments below and then print on a 10x8 or A4? I'd be interested to learn how people do this."

In the old days with fiber base [sic] paper, it was easy—the verso (back) side of print paper had the same surface as ordinary writing paper and you just wrote on it with a fairly hard pencil, which didn't come off on the next print down and didn't fade or degrade over time.

As far as how you add information to archival standards (i.e., with no deleterious effects to the print, even over time, or to other prints stacked in contact with it)...I don't know. Maybe MHMG of Aardenburg Imaging or Ken Tanaka of the AIC can help us with this. One absolute requirement is that the information and the picture would have to be integral, i.e., some solution such as printed material placed in the same box but separated from the print is absolutely a no-go.

Anybody else have any ideas or insights? I'd be glad to know the "best-practices" answer to this question myself.

Mike

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Index Prints

[...This follows on the previous post. —Ed.]

 

Here's a simple way to make sense of a sprawling, less-than-perfectly organized ongoing archive of photographs of the sort most of us have—and eventually help preserve your pictures at the same time.

First, buy three boxes.

You might need more than one set, but this will get the point across.

You really don't need anything fancier than this archival drop-front metal-edge box. But if you want to spend more, naturally you can.

Then, whenever you get a photograph that you think is unusually good, regardless of what you took it with (phone, carry-along camera, big rig) and regardless of the reason you think it might be worth preserving (your best artwork, documentary record, something you want to remember, good family snapshot), just make a small print of it on a standard size of paper that fits the box. Doesn't matter whether you make the print yourself or whether you have it made. Mix and match if need be. All you really need is a good representation of the picture.

So why three boxes? So you can use the 1-2-3 editing method. I've written about this before. Basically, a 1 is a 100% hit, a picture you love or consider your best. A 2 is an "almost" or "not sure yet." A 3 is something decent or interesting that maybe you liked at first that didn't quite make the cut, but that you still respect enough to keep, or a provisional failure that you can learn from or think you can build on in the future.

It's both fun and critically important to consider these categories to be dynamic. Every now and then, sift through your no. 1 box and consider if any of the pictures there have lost a little of their luster and need to be demoted to a 2. Do the same thing with the middle set and move prints up or down as you feel the urge. Look through the 3 box occasionally and see if anything's grown on you, or if anything suggests ideas for trying again.

Visual intelligence
This has all sorts of advantages for your photography...it can suggest future projects, directions, or subjects, or make you decide to stop shooting something you previously pursued; it can help you understand how your own pictures work; it can help you understand how your taste is growing and changing; it can reveal to you how your own pictures change with time. Visual intelligence is not quite the same thing as thinking. Actually looking at your pictures helps you understand things you couldn't otherwise.

It's also a rewarding way of simply revisiting and enjoying your own work from time to time.

I like the idea of having one nicer box for the best pictures and cheaper ones for the 2s and 3s. But make sure they all accommodate the same size paper so you can sift and sort and move prints from box to box easily.

Customize to suit
Of course, if you have enough threads in your work, you can have different sets of boxes...one for the main stream of your serious work and one for ephemera, for example; one for pro work and one for personal; one for "fine printing" prospects and one for when you were just playin' around (I do a lot of playing around!); one for yourself and one to show friends and family. It's very flexible. You decide. Just make it make sense to you.

And it's a natural method of "picture preservation" to boot. If you label the no. 1 box "John Doe's Best Photographs 2000–2010," or "Grandfather Doe's Favorite Family Pictures," or "J. Doe Published Work," and every print has notations on it, it would take a hard-hearted family indeed to toss that box into the dumpster when you eventually kick off this coil! (Which I hope happens when you're a hundred and twelve, lest this sound macabre.) Rather, your family—even the not-yet-born members—could well be permanently grateful for the work you did to help them understand and identify the pictures that mattered to you...and the people and places in them.

Does this sound like a lot of work? Well then it does, but it's the sort of work artists and photographers do.

And here's a nice idea to help you with your labeling: imagine your boxes and pictures being discovered by a not-yet-born grandchild or great-grandchild. Help your descendant out. Let him or her know what's in the box and why they mattered, and ditto for each picture. Don't make assumptions that anything is self-evident. Just because everyone in the family now knows it's Uncle Joe, don't assume the person discovering the box in the future will. 

Finally, maybe consider these "index prints" to be merely a visually-accessible catalog of sorts. It's not necessary to think of them as the final form of any of the work. Use them as workprints for sequencing exhibits or books, or as rough guide prints for future fine printing at larger sizes, or for showing to other photographers to get their reaction, or for combining into diptychs, or to help you do whatever you want to do with them. There's no reason to stop being creative with the pictures just because they're already "in the box."

Mike

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Picture Permanence

Back in the saddle this morning—I needed to take yesterday off for personal reasons.

I have a few more thoughts about "picture permanence" (PicP)—similar to "print permanence," except that not every picture has to be a print.

There seems to me a division in motives for PicP. And that is, do you want to keep your pictures safe and secure for your lifetime, or last beyond it?

I can see reasons for either choice.

Another consideration is whether we're talking personally or culturally. I tend to think "culturally"—that is, I'd like to see pictures in general—everyone's—stand a chance of survival as part of the historical and cultural record, both because some of them contain important information for posterity and because I find them charming to look at and study. I've spent a great deal of time in my life looking at old photographs. So I'm part of the posterity of earlier generations of photographers, and I appreciate being able to see their work. I see no good reason not to return the favor.

But "in-lifetime" preservation and "post-lifetime" preservation have different aspects. In the former, we're most often seeking to preserve a "working archive"—that is, all of our rough work, in the form of retrievable negatives/files. And we continue to work, dynamically, out of that archive, making new prints, drawing new exhibits or books or collections of other sorts, discovering older gems we'd missed, building themes, analyzing our trends or patterns or concerns, finding new ways to use older pictures, and so forth. For a working archive, most of us keep some large portion of "all of our shooting"—maybe not always more than half, depending on how we cull as we go, but everything that has some promise. These archives might consist of thousands or tens of thousands of negatives or terabytes of digital data. This is the rough ore we work from.

If we're thinking of posthumous PicP, on the other hand, it's more efficient to leave behind small collections of full redacted work—creations that fully show our creative intentions. Books, beautiful portfolios, finished prints sold to others, magazines articles, pictures in museums or historical societies and so forth.

What struck me yesterday as I was trying to untangle all this is this: it might be that maintaining an in-lifetime archive might be one of the best ways to insure that our pictures do not reach posterity, that is, do not last after we ourselves expire!

The problem is one I've mentioned many times and that several readers also highlighted in comments—if you leave your heirs all of your shooting—the great mass of your raw work, as slides or negatives or as large numbers of files on multiple redundant hard drives, what in the world are they going to do with all that?

Say you yourself, as a photography enthusiast, were to inherit 80,000 slides or 350,000 digital pictures from a forebear—what would you make of it? It takes an enormous amount of work for someone else to redact all your work into some digestible or distilled form. If they even knew how you'd do it if you were doing it, which they won't.

If you count on someone else doing it, chances are it won't get done.

Of course, sometimes it does get done. There's Hugh Crawford's Jamie Livingston project, in which Hugh self-published a massive book of all of his deceased friend's one-a-day Polaroids (we should all have friends like that). And there's Vivian Maier, whose large, disorganized archive was discovered just prior to her death in a storage locker auction, and, since, has become a worldwide phenomenon. From history comes the example of Eugene Atget, whose negatives were rescued from oblivion, in the nick of time, by Berenice Abbott.

They're among the exceptions that prove the rule, though. Leave behind a large mass of undifferentiated work, and it will be unlikely to bridge the gulf of between your life and your demise. That's doubly true if it requires a maintenance regimen you haven't trained someone else to do. Or even told them needs doing.

In earlier essays on this topic I opined that two effective ways to insure your pictures' permanence are craft and fame. First, make objects, as Missy Mwac says. Make exceptionally beautiful objects, and people will be reluctant to dispose of them even if they have no value. Or, be famous, because that will help your work survive. No one was going to throw away the archive of Walker Evans even if it was a jumble at his death (as Arnold Crane testified it was in On the Other Side of the Camera*). It was valuable because it was his. (His archive was acquired in 1994 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.)

Of course, it's not always up to us whether we're famous or not. Most of us aren't. Most of us don't even try.

But a third way of insuring permanence for your pictures is to make finished work. Or at least make edited work—that is, pick out the few pictures you think have value and make your choices easy for others to understand.

Gordon Lewis, Precipitation

Here's a further way to help insure PicP: add info. A photo with the date of creation, photographer's name, data about the subject, and a few lines of accurate story is far more interesting to strangers who are unfamiliar with it (a plain way to say "posterity") than without it. For example, consider Gordon's "Precipitation," above, a picture you probably already know. Here are a few things that could be said about it:

• That it was taken by Gordon
• You could add a few words about who Gordon is and when he lived, and what kind of photographer he is
• Where it was taken
• That he took it while reviewing a Pentax DSLR (which will be historical one day if it isn't already)
• That it achieved some viral fame online and ended up in several published books
• That he sold several hundred fine prints of it "by popular demand"
• That even without the woman, the place it was taken is now changed and unrecognizable

Isn't it more interesting with its story? I think it would be, to anyone who knew nothing about it and is encountering it cold.

And don't think you can't add relevant information about pictures that are meant to "stand alone," too. You might have a picture of a rock and tree, but maybe it was taken by a recovering addict while attending a Charlie Cramer workshop and printed on an inkjet printer and made from a scanned color negative and the tree got hit by lighting seven years later and the picture was published in a calendar and helped restore the photographer's confidence and will to live and...whatever. You get the idea. There is always something interesting to say about a photograph, even if it's just background.

So then, to help your work survive:

• Select mercilessly
• Make objects (prints)—(Missy Mwac's dictum)
• Craft them (or have them crafted) well
• Make your pictures (or yourself) known (if possible)
• Add information

Here's the point: almost all of these recommendations for picture permanence are helped by simply making a portfolio of prints, which is something all photographers used to do.

I'll summarize a few recommendations in the next post—they'd get lost if I tacked them on way down here. Stay tuned....

Mike

*I edited the text for Arnold.

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Steve Renwick: "Gordon sold several hundred prints of that image?? Good for him! Still enjoying mine."

Mike replies: Yes, over two sales he sold a total of 304 prints, give or take a few.

Print to Save

Don't press like. Don't press save. Press print. Print to save.

Someone named Missy Mwac is being discussed recently (although, as a recovering alcoholic and a confessed WFPB fanatic, I can't see how someone who eats bacon and loves vodka could be your guide to anything, much less the murky waters. That's murky living if you ask me).

But I digress, as I do. Suffice it to say that I love her recent article "The Lesson from Costco's Photo Lab," discovered via reader robert e via PetaPixel.

A quote:

I tell you true from the bottom of my heart, the snapshots you have today will be MORE important later. But, later, well, you won’t have them. 30 years from now, when you are searching for that photo of your dad at his birthday or your daughter in her kindergarten play, you won’t have it.

And when you are gone and your kids are searching for family pictures, what will they find? A link to an online gallery? An obsolete hard drive?

Or boxes and albums full of wonderful printed photos, photos they will hold in their hands and pass around the table and treasure more than gold.

A pic:

This is one of my great-grandfathers, John D. Collett, in youth and age. I never knew him. Missy says: "If you don't think photos are important, wait until they are all you have left."

Argument by anecdote:

When my son was little, I would take pictures—digital pictures—of him before he left in the morning on his first day of school every year. They were among the first digital pictures I lost. I clicked the wrong button and didn't know how to undo what I did. Poof. Gone. I have one print—a water-damaged dye-based print that fades a little more whenever you so much as whisper "light." That's all that's left.

Of course I have a digital file of the print, too...don't tell Missy on me.

Mike
(Thanks to robert e)

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The Beauty of Physical Prints

...Or, why I chose the Ctein prints I chose for the current print sale.

[UPDATE: Sale ended 2 p.m. EST Saturday, March
9th, 2019. Thanks to all who participated!]

Printmaking—a word that encompasses making photographic prints, and the prints themselves—has always been an exceedingly important part of my enjoyment of photography. I'm both a part of the audience and a maker. I like objects. I like pictures of all sorts. But I especially enjoy well-made photographic prints.

Having done it professionally for a spell in the '80s and '90s, I'm aware of some of the problems and pitfalls. Without a doubt, one of the problems is representing light—or, I should say, representing light with reference more to the experience of seeing the real light than with reference to the photographic conventions we've all come to take for granted (some of us with more sanguinity than others). Few things in my opinion are more difficult to get right than Christmas lights. I don't personally care for photographs of Christmas lights, but they're a subject that Ctein has pursued for years and clearly greatly enjoys, so I thought, why not? I thought his bereft fans hereabouts would approve of seeing samples from various themes in his work. I envisioned this as a print that people might frame but put away for 11 months of the year, and then bring out for holiday guests! But the amazing thing is how close he got to the visual impression you'd get seeing those lights. They seem to glow. And it's just not easy to print objects so they seem to be emitting light.

As far as the icefall print is concerned, I could gas on for a while about the quasi-abstract properties, the movement of the lines, the richness of detail that pulls your eye around and about inside the print, and the tension of field-flatness versus the sense of bas-relief that you get from the three-dimensional ice. But really, for me, the ice print is just about those astounding blues. It seems like there are only a few colors and yet at the same time dozens of colors, all them shifting and shimmering, playing off each other; the color seems bright and vivid yet at the same time subtle and gentle. I don't know quite how he does this. Anyway all those tensions (never mind the tension inherent in a vertical wall of ice in the first place) make the print both quiet—yet another contradiction?—but with a lot going on.

The star of the show in my humble opinion is the Canadian Northern lights photograph, taken on a cold night near Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Primarily, it's a spectacular display; you can almost hear the eerie "music of the spheres" as a ghostly soundtrack to the visuals. There are a couple more things I like about it. The leaning traffic sign—recognizable by its shape—and the receding line of telephone poles (you can hardly see them in the JPEG) give the scene on the ground a desolate, remote feel, intimating the inhospitable vibe of the cold nighttime landscape. Then in the middle of the picture there is just a hint of pink or reddish color, which gives the flagrant greens more depth and subtlety. Finally the stars. You can see what must be thousands of them (unlike the four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, I'm not going to count them all). How the printer (human) and the printer (machine) managed to image such tiny pinpoints of white I'm not even going to ask. The JPEG just can't begin to resolve all this. Again, this print is something of a printmaker's virtuoso trick—taking light of such fathomless complexity and translating it into the limited range, palette, and resolution of pigment ink on paper such that it really does convey not just the visual impression but the emotional impression of real light, real sky. It's remarkable.

It's what realistic, naturalistic, representational fine printmaking is all about in photography. Love it. Isn't it a shame that just as the best-ever (or best-ever-so-far) method of color printing really comes of age, with such gorgeous materials, the making of fine prints itself is starting to go out of fashion? Even I look at 99% of the photographs I see on screens—and I love prints.

Don't forget Ctein's return visit here is going to be brief—this sale lasts only three days. It ends tomorrow. [UPDATE: Sale ended 2 p.m. EST Saturday, March 9th, 2019. Thanks to all who participated!]

All I can tell you if that if you like the pictures you will like the prints. Very enjoyable to look at, and a pleasure to see.

Mike

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David Dyer-Bennet: "I've seen, not the print sale versions, but other versions of the aurora print, and I think the Christmas lights print (I've seen a number of Christmas lights prints and am thus not utterly certain it was exactly that image), and they are everything Mike says they are. As for the colors in the icefall print, my answer is 'that's what's there when you see it.' (I'm only moderately confident it's the waterfall I'm thinking of; but the colors are a property of ice, not a property of the particular waterfall; you'll see similar colors in many glacier and iceberg photos). And in my experience they seem reasonably compatible with modern digital color imaging (not always the case). Which makes them no less gorgeous, and the higher compositional elements of that image no less excellent."

Dark Prints and Viewing Light

JOHN GILLOOLY* wrote yesterday: "Mike, I think I posed a question to you years ago about Karsh after looking at a collection of his portraits of the Marshall Supreme Court that is housed at Boston University Law School. I found the prints to be very dark in the same way I think you are describing of Garo? Compared with the tones we see today, the images seem very dark overall, with even the highlights not coming anywhere near white. They are only highlights relative to the general darkness off the rest of the tones. I haven't seen any other prints of Karsh, so I wasn't sure if this is typical of all of his work? But I guess we can see where this came from.  —John, Boston."

I've never seen the prints in question, and I've never seen early Karsh prints, which might have something like John Garo's style of tonality. (Early work does tend to resemble peoples' models or the previous prevailing styles—Both Ansel Adams's and Edward Weston's very early work resembled pictorialism, for instance.) If not, though, then it's quite likely that it's a matter of viewing light.

Low light levels are common even in good museums today. This is a custom or fashion based on some mix of two things: conservation of the prints, and conservation of the institution's electric bills. (I have the latter on good authority, by the way—I'm not imputing base motives on the basis of supposition only.) In any event, it's apparent that inadequate lighting is a cross we have to bear these days. Another cudgel to the side of the head of the precious baby seal of the masterpieces of the past, forgive my hyperbole.

Outdated tech stuff
A bit of technical background: the light that strikes a print actually passes through the emulsion twice—once on the way in toward the paper base, and once after it reflects off the paper and comes back out.

There are a number of cool things that this implies. For one thing, it's critical for a darkroom printer to choose the right light level under which to evaluate prints during the printing process. I can sometimes see the printmaker's mistakes in choosing viewing-light levels when I look at prints on display. I could train anyone of visual sensitivity to do this with the right demonstration setup. One obvious example is when you go to an exhibit at a brightly-lit gallery and see B&W prints where the blacks are obviously just dark gray, not a full, rich black. Non-photographer critics can even bloviate about this like it's artistic choice, on which I call BS—it's just that the viewing light the photographer was using to make his choices in the darkroom was too dim. The dim light made the blacks seem black to him. Throw the finished product under stronger light, though, and oops! Suddenly the blacks don't look so black any more.

[Usage note: I'm in the habit of using the word "printer" in the old-fashioned way, to mean a person in a darkroom who is making a print. Now that printer more commonly means one of these**, I'm trying to use the word "printmaker" when referring to the person doing the work.

Unfortunately that's not entirely unambiguous either, as "printmaker" used to refer to a human doing "printmaking," which referred to old-fashioned fine-art methods of making prints, such as etching, woodcuts, stone lithography, silkscreening, etc. But a human in the darkroom has more in common with a human inking a copper plate than she does with a hulk of black plastic that says "Epson" on the front, so I'm doing the best I can on that front, I think. —Ed.]

Optical brighteners in printing paper also threw inexperienced printmakers off, especially if they evaluated their prints under fluorescent lights. The fluorescents could excite the brighteners and make the highlights look brighter than they would look under incandescent light, causing the printmaker to print the highlights too dark and dull. I've seen this flaw in exhibited work many times too.

When I was printing, my strategy was to look at the test strip and the guide print in various different kinds of light. (This caused me to wander around various buildings staring at the tray held in front of me like one of the Peripatetics of Aristotle, but then people in art schools and studio art cooperatives have to be tolerant of eccentricity.) I developed a sense of the right compromise. It's always a compromise, unless you know for sure in advance the light levels under which your prints will be displayed.

Light in darkness
There's another really cool effect of the light passing through the print emulsion twice. It's that when you take a negative with plentiful information in the shadows and print it dark, so that all the shadows look black from the front, you can shine a light through the print from behind the print—from the back—and suddenly see a whole lot more detail in the shadows. It's like brightening the shadows by 50%, because now the light is only passing through the emulsion once.

I once found a nice example. It was a heavy tangle of bramble in the woods which had an opening in it. The opening led to a covered interior space that was heavily shaded by the foliage above it. My print of that made the opening look a pure featureless black—but if I put a flashlight to the back of the print, suddenly it was as if you were shining a light into the inner space itself—you could see all kinds of detail in the interior.

My idea was to put a person inside the space, retake the picture, and then hang the framed print with an integral lightbox behind it. The viewer would look at the plain print and see a black opening to the copse of bramble, seeing nothing there, then press a button, turning the light box on, at which point they'd see the interior space with the previously invisible person in it looking out.

Neat idea, but of course I never carried it out. Most of my ideas bloom in my head for a while but never get reified. I'm not good on follow-through. (But getting better, as I've been working on it.) The exhibit of all the cool artwork I never made would be a good show, I'll tell ya that. :-)

Another example: There is or was a landscape photographer whose name escapes me at the moment who made giant double-unsharp-masked prints from 8x10 negatives of remote wilderness areas. He is a virtuoso and his printmaking process is technically very involved. He came to my loft in Chicago one day for a private showing of his prints. Because of the limitations of transport he showed me only his "medium-sized" prints, which were up to six feet in the long dimension. Here's what he did: first, he showed a print on an easel under normal room light, in which it looked dark and flat. Then he took two very bright floodlamps with barndoors and positioned them quite close to print. Turning them on flooded the prints with blazing bright light, and bam—they were transformed! Suddenly all the tones looked "right" and extremely vivid, and the illusion of looking at snowy mountains on a brilliantly sunlit day was startlingly realistic.

He had printed the prints to display properly under unusually bright light.

Charles Phillips. Not to be confused with the Western photographer from Mariposa of the same name. The JPEGs at the link are nothing like the real things.

Anyway, long story short (unless it's too late for that), my suspicion is that the prints you saw were printed for bold, bright midcentury viewing lighting, and you were looking at them under tepid, fey, postmodern viewing lighting. This is only a guess, but I'd need to know more to be convinced I'm wrong.

Mike
(Thanks to John)

*I reproduce all commenters' names just as they wrote them, unless requested to do otherwise.

**I actually had a dream about making prints with a big Epson last night. I'm not kidding. And in my dream, I had figured out a way to make someone else pay for the ink.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Here’s the situation

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Camp (partial comment): "I went to a photo show of historic prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I could barely make out the images because of low lighting and protective glass. I wanted to pull out my iPhone and turn on the flashlight app to check out the pix, but I chickened out.

"There seems to be a basic contradiction here—they want to preserve rare prints, but for what? So they can sit in drawers, unseen, until they're dead? Or they're pulled out for some kind of ritual artifact display, in which you can't actually see the photos, but have to take it on faith that they're there?

"With delicate, sensitive photos, why doesn't the museum make precise copies, which I think really good digital printers could do, and display those, so we could see the images under brighter lights? You wouldn't get to see the actual artifact, but why is that different than seeing an actual artifact (say, 'Moonrise') that was 'printed later?' And often, much later? I've also noticed that with many really old, delicate photos, some of the details are hard to make out, even under crystal clear museum glass. I think it would be very interesting to make a precise copy of the photo, right down to the the precise colors or shades, and to the exact millimeter in correct size, as the main point of a display, but then surround it with blow-ups of details, and also tonal adjustments that the curators believe would accurately represent the original, un-aged print."

Mike replies: We should get Ken Tanaka to pass this idea along to the PTB at the AIC. (Powers-that-be at the Art Institute of Chicago.) Maybe it would make its way into the art world from there. Maybe the originals could hang under a thick weighted piece of black velvet that viewers could lift briefly under the watchful eye of a guard, like this precious artifact was when I saw it in D.C.

The best way to preserve prints would be to entomb them in archival enclosures and store them in a salt mine, and never let anybody look at them. That way when humanity goes extinct from climate change, they'll be there for aliens to discover. ...After the aliens get over their surprise about the dinosaurs being all gone. "Dude, wasn't this planet just full of giant lizards for, like, eons? What the hell happened here?"

I'm still waiting for the first museum exhibit of prints made by the curators from images that existed only in digitized form prior to the exhibit. That would take a curator (male or female!) with cojones.

James Bullard: "There is one other factor that applies in printing and that is drydown. Ansel used to dry his tests in his microwave oven to be sure of the final tones. I find that drydown is even a factor in digital printing, at least with the mat surfaced paper I mostly use. Wet inks, even slightly wet inks, reflect more light."

Mike replies: Some silver gelatin papers suffered from quite a lot of drydown and some very little. For me it was just a matter of really getting to know the paper. I know I tried the microwave thing once. Decided it was a tad iffy from a food safety standpoint, since of course I didn't have access to a microwave dedicated exclusively to drying prints.

Tony McLean responds to James and Mike: "I used to avoid drydown with my silver gelatin prints by using a technique borrowed from the water colourists—I taped the washed print to a piece of 1/4 inch glass and let it dry overnight. The print was drum tight in the morning and no shrinkage equals no density increase."

Geoff Wittig: "Digital inkjet printing is very much prone to errors in value control, and prints notoriously tend to come off the printer looking way too dark. Low ambient light in viewing conditions is part of the problem, so I finally got a decently bright daylight balanced viewing light to check my prints to make sure the shadow details I intended are actually there in the print.

"A much bigger problem is the innate difference between transmitted light on the computer monitor and reflected light in the print. It's very easy to see endless shadow detail on a bright computer monitor that disappears in the print.

"The solution has two parts: the first is to turn down the monitor brightness (some authorities state 90 cd/m^2 [candela per square meter], but 'less bright' is a good first approximation). The second comes from Charlie Cramer's fabulous printing course, and is an invaluable technique. You set your Photoshop 'infopallete' so one of the readouts is in L a b colorspace. Then place your cursor over a shadow area where you want some detail to show, and check the values. The 'L' in L a b is luminosity, and gives a simple numeric value. Anything less than about 6 will print as dead black (depending on your printer), no matter how much detail you can see on that monitor. Somewhere between 8 and 12 you'll see subtle shadow detail. From 15 or so higher you'll see lots of detail. Simply using this tool saves you lots of wasted paper for prints that lost their shadow separation."

Michael Perini: "Re light traveling through the emulsion twice, When my second daughter was preparing her thesis show at University of Pennsylvania, she had an idea to accentuate the effect. She had shot portraits of women's shoes. Her idea was to print them on glass and then frame them three inches in front of a mirror. Ten by ten sheets of glass, 10x10 mirrors, and we made 3 1/2" deep shadow-box frames to hold the sandwich. We had to polyurethane the glass, paint on the 'Liquid Light' emulsion in a bottle, then process. The effect was stunning.

"She got the thesis prize that year. A nice memory. I pulled them out a few years ago, and they had faded quite a bit. I must have gotten the fixing or washing wrong. It was the only time I ever worked with liquid emulsion."

hugh crawford: "When I was in college I made the mistake of judging my exposure in the darkroom by looking at my prints standing next to a window with a sopping wet print in the tray. Between the print drying down about a stop and the bright viewing light they were pretty much viewable only in direct sunlight, or about 500 watts of Lowell Totalight (RIP Russ Lowell by the way). They were on the 'old' Portriga and it turns out that overexposed prints scan really well so it's good that I saved them. Still at the time I had a portfolio that was optimized for viewing either outdoors ('funny running into you here in the parking lot, want to see some prints?') or under really bright light. Fun fact; stores and galleries like to turn the lights up really bright because it makes people want to buy things, and painters tend to have studios that are lit to daylight levels."

Kenneth Tanaka: "We have over 200 prints by Karsh in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, gathered from the 1950s to 2014 (I think). I can't claim to have seen them all (probably most) but I can say that there is (understandable) variation in papers and general print warmth. I do not know what you would consider 'dark' but I can say that Karsh did keep the highlights of his prints below (paper) white. However, the overall impression of 'brightness' is largely conveyed via the contrast of the image. The 1946 portrait of Henry Ford II, for example, presents a brighter impression than, say, the duller 1971 portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor even though it's certainly 'darker.' But your (visual) mileage may vary.

"Regarding museum light levels, I've been on a bit of a personal campaign to visit as many of the major museums, at least in America, as possible for the past several years. (My aching feet!) I have no doubt that museums do attempt to reduce their electric bills. But I can say that any lowered lighting levels in shows at larger museums are primarily due to conservation considerations, not 'fashion' or electric costs. (Museums have become sensitive to the gripe about gloomy galleries.) Advancements in research of the effects of various lighting on print integrity have made exhibition standards for chemical prints more conservative during recent years. It has become common for loan agreements, for example, to mandate maximum footcandle-hour exposures for high-value prints loaned for shows. Advancements in LED lighting, light filtration, and glazing are gradually helping to mitigate this, but these newer technologies for world-class museums are very expensive. So it will take a while.

"(By the way, If you're interested in print conservation and you're visiting the AIC by April 28 be sure to visit Sylvie Pénichon's outstanding exhibition on Conserving Photographs now on view in Gallery 10!)

"Anyone can make an appointment to view prints in the AIC collection for just the price of general admission during the museum's normal weekday hours. Just call the museum and ask to talk with the Department of Photography's collection manager.

"Closer to John Gillooly's location, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has over 900 Karsh prints in their collection. Why not make an appointment to visit some of them this spring?"

Bruce Alan Greene: "A while back I went to see the Huntington Library's collection of original Weston prints. I guess to preserve these old prints, they display them only on occasion and...in dim light. And they looked so dull displayed this way that one was left wondering why anyone thought they were such good photographs. Even the bookshop at the museum was a better viewing experience. Sad."

Mike replies: Sometimes I think books really do give a better representation of prints than the real thing. Another example is one of my all-time favorite books, Roy De Carava: A Retrospective. The reproductions are faithful in feel, but just slightly better balanced than the real prints. They look better, read better, and seem more beautiful to me, compared to some originals I was able to compare to the reproductions in the book.

Glenn Brown: "I was once sent to Ottawa by my boss to pick up copies of his then-new book Karsh Canadians as corporate giveaways. He was very charming and appreciative of the book purchase and I had the opportunity to talk about his prints. His technique was that you had to be able to 'read through' the negative and print accordingly. They were what I would call 'thin.' After that I did print darker than before."

Sal Santamaura (partial comment): " I've gotten to the point where it's not worthwhile traveling any distance to view exhibits. They're almost always so dark one cannot see the prints anyway."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Printing dark was apparently an intentional style early in the 20th century, or so says a museum curator. While viewing a photo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art several years ago, I saw several dark prints by famous photographers. I was wondering if they had faded when I noticed a museum placard next to these prints. It said they weren't faded and were well-preserved original prints from that time."

Recommended Portfolio Boxes

A few suggestions for print storage boxes:

My personal favorites are Century Archival boxes. These are simple, sturdy, plain boxes but much more elegant than single-wall board boxes such as metal-edge boxes.

"Slimline" (shallow depth) Century Archival box

I prefer the ones that aren't too deep because once they're full of prints you can store them vertically on bookshelves. Of course that works better for the smaller print sizes. I particularly like the elegant 11x14x1 size, which fit on the same bookshelves I keep my photo books on.

8x10-inch Century Archival box

11x14-inch Century Archival box (1 inch deep, B&H; 2 inches deep, B&H; 1 inch deep, Amazon; 2 inches deep, Amazon.)

14x18-inch Century Archival box (B&H Photo, Amazon)

13x19-inch Century Archival box (1.5 inches deep, B&H Photo, Amazon)

16x20-inch Century Archival box

(For larger sizes, museum cases are sturdier. Read on.)

Solander cases
If you have the luxury of storing boxes flat, you're in luck these days. When fine, thick-walled archival Solander cases were made by American and British bookbinders, they cost so much that the market for them gradually withered away. I have an old Spink and Gabor (formerly "Gaborc") Solander case with a leather handle that is gorgeous. But now, China to the rescue!

Actually I don't know where these are made. China's just a guess.

Museum cases

The classic drop-back design was invented by the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander (1733-1782) while working for the British Museum

Anyway, offshore (shall we say) fabrication has made Solander cases accessible again. Here are two brands that are beautiful but aren't too expensive:

Archival Methods 14x18x2.5" Solander Museum Case (see the dropdown menu at the web page for other sizes)

Print File 14x18 Solander case (search the website for other sizes)

Note that the Print File cases are special-order products and can take a while to arrive.

For plain out-of-sight storage, search the term "metal edge box" at B&H Photo, Amazon, or other sources.

Plain ol' utilitarian metal edge boxes are acid-free and
will not rot your photographs

If you need a full-line archival museum supplies company, try Conservation Resources International in Oxford, UK, and Virginia, USA. Be aware that such businesses in general sometimes have a wait time before shipping product. CRI is better than some others.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "I second Mike’s endorsement of the Century brand clamshell print storage boxes. They are rather pricey but they are quite robust. One key distinction they have over less expensive boxes is that the ends are robust enough to remain at 90 degrees rather than beginning to poke-out over time. I would also caution people to strongly consider whether or not they really need “museum cases”. Having spent much time in museum vaults handling museum cases my warning is that they are heavy. Darn heavy!. Their frames are made of wood and the panels must be made of lead (at least they feel that way by the end of a day schlepping them). If you go with simple archival metal-edged boxes (which are also just fine) be sure to get ones that feature drop-front bottoms. It makes removal of prints so much easier than simple closed-in edges."

Peter Komar (partial comment): "Wow, I actually own all three types of these cases, they all work quite nicely. My favorite is the hinged type with the carry handle but I only have one of that style. The others work just fine and I consider the last one for work-in-progress prints that have not yet been matted for presentation."

Rodger P. Kingston: "My biggest problem with portfolio boxes is that so few of them are available in digital print sizes: 8.5x11, 13x19, and 17x22 for example. If all us digital photographers can get used to these new sizes, you'd think that the box manufacturers could adapt as well. I'm forced to use the rather flimsy boxes and envelopes that printing papers come in (they don't look too impressive when you're showing work to a curator or gallery director). Does anybody out there know if any of these boxes mentioned above also come in the digital sizes? Or know of any other brands that do?"

Mike replies: Mark Hobson, who visited here a few days ago, told a funny story about using paper boxes for prints. He had a presentation to make at Kodak some years ago. He was careful to print the pictures for the proposal on Kodak paper—anything else was considered a major faux pas—but when he was in the elevator heading to the meeting at Kodak headquarters, he suddenly realized he'd had a major brain fart and was carrying the prints in an Agfa box! With no way to change at that point, he just soldiered through the presentation. He was lucky—it didn't turn out to be his last job for Kodak.

It's really strange that after a great many years with standardized photo paper sizes, we somehow decided to switch to completely different sizes for digital inkjet paper. It makes no sense, and furthermore I don't know by what odd mechanism the new consensus was reached. It seems to have to come about by some type of black magic or mass delusion. However it happened, it's pointless, needless, and confusing.

JOHN GILLOOLY: "I've been following these posts with particular interest. My personal experience is that when I use boxes, I seem to never actually open them! The prints seem to go in and never surface again. I have settled on a hybrid of your suggestions. I have settled upon 8.5x11-inch stock and I print various image sizes on that canvas. But I have decided to use the Itoya Art Profolio products. Most of my printing consist of 6x9 on 8.5x11 stock. Usually Epson Premium Luster or Portfolio Rag. Most of these prints are of family and I have been making a concerted effort to write the appropriate info on the back of each print. For these family images, I have been using the thicker volume book which has 90 pages for a 180 print book. For "art" prints, I do have some in the archival boxes but also mostly use these same Itoya products for that as well. I often pick through those books and send prints to a client for some occasion. But I love the idea that was mentioned of the 'wine party.'"

AN: "Regarding the change in standard photo paper sizes, I imagine it's due to copier/printer manufacturers (and copier/printer paper manufacturers) sticking with the ANSI standards they were already using before they all got into the photo printing market. Epsons and HPs and Canons and Ricohs were all primarily printing text documents before dabbling in graphics...and then better graphics...and then 'photo quality' graphics...and before you know it, there's a photo printer designed for standard document-size paper, and a bunch of paper options that have crept along the same development path in parallel. The fact that ANSI sizes are all a bit bigger than the closest classic photo print sizes (and therefore can be cut down, if desired) would just ease any friction in the transition."

The Pile of Prints Problem

I still haven't finished with the comments to the previous two posts. It's keeping ahead of me.

But here's another subject. Reader Brian Stewart, who inspired my confession in the "Printing Problem" post the other day, responded to that post, in part:

"The obstacle I had thought you might have hit, and one I still struggle with, is what to do with all those prints? Brooks Jensen of Lenswork has written and spoken about the 'pile of prints' problem, given that there's only so much wall space, and exhibition possibilities and print sales are not that common. I think that confronting the growing pile of prints and finding your own solution is a larger obstacle."

Okay, so what about that "pile of prints" problem then?

Obviously, there are a great many solutions to the problem of creating, sharing and storing physical photographs, and I'm not saying you "should" do anything in particular. You should do what works for you.

But this is a problem I wrestled with for years. Not because I've mastered the problem, but because I haven't. I'm naturally disorganized, and my persistent problem with depression has made consistent discipline difficult over the years. This is just a description of one solution I like.

First, determine the size of your largest bookshelf. Then determine what size of portfolio box will fit on those shelves, stored upright like a book. I prefer the slimmer sizes of boxes because the prints store upright more easily without slumping over. You might need to procure "filler" sheets such as archival corrugated or foam core board (be sure to use an archival brand) for partially filled boxes.

One size fits all
Then, standardize on that size of printing paper—no matter the size of your image. Think of the page as your "canvas"—make the image areas large or small within the limits of the paper size, or even print multiple images on the same sheet. Standardize, or be creative with your canvas. The choice is up to you.

If the overall paper size is uniform, then it all fits neatly into the boxes you've chosen; if the boxes fit your shelves, then you have a place to put them.

I suggest using a 1-2-3 system for editing, and continuing to cull the collection over time. In the "good" boxes on the shelf, put only your very best prints, the ones you're 100% proud of and that you consider fully realized and fully finished. "Almosts" and good pictures you're not quite sure of are twos, and flawed prints/pictures just this side of the wastebasket you wish to keep for reference or sentimentality or as aids to memory, or for some other reason, are threes. Twos and threes can be kept in cheaper metal-edge boxes in the closet. They're not for showing.

Share!
What to do with your prints in the good boxes? Well, personally I enjoy looking through my own prints from time to time, just by myself. The editing process is ongoing—ones get demoted to twos if I get tired of them, and twos that grow on me can be promoted to ones.

But of course the main reason to have a box of your best prints is to share them with others. Take the box off the shelf from time to time and go through the pictures with a friend, relative, or visitor. You can even make formal appointments with people for the purpose of looking through some of your prints—most artistically-inclined people will be complimented if you ask them to look at your work (especially if you're kind enough to emphasize that they don't owe you formal reactions or comments. You'll still get reactions even if you don't ask, so don't worry about this).

Another good reason to use a slimmer box—to shield your visitor from print-viewing overload! If he or she really wants to go through a second box, there's always that option, but two inches of prints is a lot of prints and might be too much for normal non-photographer types. (Deep boxes can always be left partially filled with foam core spacers.)

Start with where they'll end up
So to reiterate the main points: do very hard edits so only your best work makes it to the "ones" boxes; and, start with the storage space you have available and design your method backward from there.

But again, this is just a suggestion. There are many creative ways to deal with storing, sharing, and organizing prints.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

David Paterson: "I too have a serious 'pile o' prints' problem. Some of these (many, many hundreds of prints) result from printing candidate images for three recent exhibitions, but most of them exist because I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the print is the true and final destination for any photographic image. So I like to print at least one from every 'shoot,' and I am out there, nine days out of ten, taking pictures. As I often say to people, printing is my drug of choice, and I like to print big—usually on A2 and A3 (24x17") stock.

"So the pile just grows. I sell a few, perhaps a dozen in an average year and a few more when I have an exhibition; I give a few to family and friends, and very occasionally I go through one or two print-boxes or plan-chest drawers and remove anything which I really shouldn't be keeping—because I no longer like the image or because the print is in any way sub-standard.

"I have been trying to discipline myself to print less often, and to throw out an existing print every time I make a new one. This is hard going at the best of times, and there is a project which I recently decide to make a start on. It's a panorama of the Everest region of the Himalayas, shot in 1979 on 5x4" film—four images which can be stitched in software. Some time later I'm looking at an eight-foot (2.4m) panorama and a stack of 'progress' prints (made on the way to the final set).

"I really should put these in the trash but I'm finding at very hard to do so. And there's a queue of other images just begging to be printed; that pile just keeps growing."

D. Hufford: "You know, I have to admit that I have never loved printing. Not back in the film black and white days, and not now. I cannot say expense alone has been a reason although when I was a young punk living at home off the old man, I used black and white because having it printed was cheaper as was the film, at least in my memory.

"I let ink costs bother me just a bit early only in digital, but it no longer does. What else am I buying the printer for anyway? Not using it is a bigger waste of money. The thing that makes printing a pain for me is the time I spend getting most prints the way I want them. Money is secondary and I am not wealthy. Some folks may be able to consistently get a print the way they like it right off, but I can't. Apparently, neither can Charles Cramer (see Luminous Landscape) among others.

"The pile of prints problem is not a problem for me at all. I like looking at my prints. After all, why else would I be photographing anything and printing the result? My better half enjoys them too, and she occasionally even lets me put some on her precious walls. Then we rotate them. We have autumn themes, summer themes, winter themes, and autumn themes. Sometimes, she come up with others. Sales? Occasionally, but I actually find that a bit of a problem. If someone wants to buy a print of one of my photos that they have seen online, I get quite nervous. An online version of a photo may not look the same in a print. Or, if some sort of high contrast black and white may not even look good in a print. And making a print for a paying customer become much more stressful than one I accept for myself because it has to be more perfect than perfect which none of my photos ever are to begin with.

"As far as the fantasy of suddenly being discovered after I am dead, I won't care because I will be dead. Prints that may last 50 years are probably about as good as I will need."

Stephen Schafer HABS HAER Photographer: "I say give them away. As fast as you can, to anyone who will take them. He who dies with the most boxes of old prints does not win. I had a wine and cheese party at my studio once and anyone who brought a bottle of wine could take one of my loose, fiber-based darkroom prints from my archival boxes. (I supplied the cheese.) I gave away over 100 prints that night. I set up my camera in a corner where I could take a portrait of each lucky trader and the print they chose, and it was fascinating who chose what. Some prints I had never framed, or only printed one-off and moved on; other people chose some of my classics. I also ended up with about 50 bottles of wine, which are now gone...win, win. Between signing prints and taking portraits, I didn't get to mingle much, but the resulting portraits are a treat to this day."

Mike Plews: "You could just navigate around the question and make a book. You aren't begging for people's wallspace or pushing them to frame a loose print. I have had excellent luck with Blurb using their highest quality paper. A medium sized book of about a hundred prints in softcover will cost around $45 if you wait for a sale. The nice thing about this is that you are forced to look at your work overall and not just as an image or two. As for the recipient, they don't need to scramble to make sure your photo is appropriately displayed when you visit. All they have to do is pull the book out from under the bed and plop it on the coffee table and they are good to go. You don't need to be book designer to pull this off. Keep it in a simple monograph format and you are good to go. Everybody has room for another book and it's really fun to do."

Ken James (partial comment): "Hey Mike, I like your 1-2-3 box idea, I will adopt it as another one of my techniques. I love to print my photos, I was kinda amazed at the last couple of posts about the cost. Hey, worth every penny. I try to print something from every time I take out the camera."

The Economics of DIY Printing

Guest post by Mark McCormick-Goodhart

Upon hearing his first Wagnerian opera, Mark Twain reportedly said, "I doubt it's really as bad as it sounds." Everyone seems to abhor the prices all printer manufacturers charge for OEM Inks, and some wonder about third-party ink as possible salvation. However, the economics of do-it-yourself (DIY) printing are largely influenced by four factors, and the cost of OEM ink isn't one of them. The factors are:

1. The initial cost of the printer. The higher the initial price, the larger the volume of printing must be undertaken to amortize the cost of ownership over the total volume of prints you make during the printer’s "life cycle." I have done several amortization studies (unpublished to date) on consumer, prosumer, and wide-format printers, even ones with healthy rebates thrown into the deal. For low-cost desktop consumer models, figure on making approximately 250–500 ~8x10-inch RC photo prints to drive down the cost of printer + ink + RC photo paper to levels approaching the price per print you would have typically paid a service bureau for the same number of conventional enlargements onto RA-4 wet process color paper. For prosumer models (e.g., Epson P800 [$895 after rebate], Canon Pro-1000 [$999 after rebate]), figure on printing about 750–1500 8x10 RC prints before the economics of DIY printing start to turn in your favor.

2. Print size. The bigger the print, the more competitive your costs will be compared to outsourcing the file to a photo lab. No DIY printmaker can compete against the typical loss-leader pricing of 4x6 conventional wet-process resin-coated (RC) color prints. You can't even buy economy RC inkjet paper let alone any ink for the price you would pay a big volume photo finisher for 4x6 photos. However, once you start making 5x7 or larger print sizes, the labs raise their profit margins dramatically, and DIY printing even with OEM ink can become very competitive.

3. Media choice. This is a huge variable! If you are attracted to the look of custom media like Hahnemühle or Canson fine art papers, the pro labs must then also print on your desired paper with an inkjet printer, and typical pricing for providing fine art media jumps to approximately $20 per sq. ft. or more. It's a whole different market price point compared to low-cost photofinishing. Thus, It doesn't take very many 8x10, 11x14, or 16x24 prints to justify buying a 13- or 17-inch carriage width printer, nor very many 24x36 or larger prints to justify owning a wide-format printer. For example, I saved enough money to cover the capital and material costs of my 44-inch HP Z3200PS ($5,289.49) + OEM ink + paper after I completed just three 44x39-foot rolls of fine art media. I'm a low volume "print for myself only" printmaker, but I was able to pay for my Z3200PS in under six months compared to working with a pro lab for the same volume and quality of prints.

4. Print yield. All printer models can produce rejects every now and then (e.g., scratches, ink smudges, banding, clogged ink channels, aborted printing, etc.). However, generally speaking, with modern inkjet printers these issues are less than 5% of total print output, and operator error plays the greater role with print yield. If you are still a "trial and error" printmaker like most of us were in the days of the wet-process darkroom, your "keeper" print yields will likely be low, so cost per final print will be high. You may even get discouraged with DIY printing rather quickly. That said, if you take the time to master a fully color managed workflow (admittedly a steep learning curve), including the use of custom-built ICC profiles when needed, then your "first strike" print quality will be just as good as or even better than any pro lab would give you. Any further image edits you may want to make in order to reach your final "perfect" digitally mastered print would also be required when outsourcing a revised image file to a competent print provider, so again, if you have the skill set and reasonable print volumes to justify bringing printing in house, then DIY printing is the way to go.

My amortized two cents!

Happy printing,
Mark
Aardenburg-Imaging

©2018 by Mark McCormick-Goodhart, all rights reserved

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andrew: "Printing makes the photograph and it's just dang fun to do, and I'm willing to pay the cost to do it myself. I've worked to improve my understanding of how to do it well at home and I have a few favorite third party papers that I regularly use. Recently, I had a few pictures printed at a very good local printer to see if his high-end large format Canon printer could improve on the prints I made at home on my Canon Pro-100. Per his instructions, I ganged them up onto large sheets to minimize costs. Under scrutiny, they did not look better than my own prints. And it was very expensive to have them made. Lesson learned.

"The only concern that comes to mind for printing at home is that, based on my understanding, most inkjet printers have to be regularly exercised (used) to maintain optimum health."

Andre Y: "Thanks Mike for publishing Mark's essay! He's one of the few posters on the Internet who knows printing well, and it's good to see his contribution here.

"To expand on a couple of Mark's points, if you want to use a particular paper, then you will almost certainly have to print at home. While my local pro shop is very good at what they do, they have pretty limited selections of paper (which are three different varieties of Hahnemühle and very good, but still limited).

"Of course, at this point, you'll have to spend even more money and time because you will need to create a custom profile for the paper as it is printed on your printer: the manufacturers' canned profiles will sort of get you to the ballpark, but are nowhere as good as a custom profile. This has a somewhat steep learning curve, but is doable with some patience. But then again, nothing worth doing well is easy. (The exceptions are people who use Mark's printer, which can make its own profiles.)

"And speaking of paper, my paper costs outweigh my ink costs by a considerable amount, mainly because I tend to use fairly expensive paper. I don't even run one of those large high capacity printers: it's a Canon Pro-10 with little 14ml cartridges.

"Lastly, there's at least one paper reseller in the UK who has the enlightened policy of making free custom profiles for their customers for any of the papers they sell. Why no one in the US has copied this to immediately gain a long-term customer is baffling to me."

BH: "This is all well and good if you're simply crunching numbers. What is written here makes sense. Unfortunately it doesn't account for the mind of the individual who runs the printer. And in the case of many, the recurring feeling of being ripped off every time one of your dozen cartridges gets low is a major barrier to making prints. It may not make sense from a purely financial standpoint, but separating human emotion from financial decisions is about as easy as getting the eggs out of the cake batter."

Brian Stewart: "Mark's guest article is probably the best summary analysis of DIY printing that I've read. However for me, DIY is about the creative process rather than the economics. There's always been a dividing line between those who saw printing your images yourself as an inseparable part of the creative process (e.g. Ansel) and those who saw it as a distraction from the creative process (e.g, HCB). Yes, you have to come to terms with the economics in order to make DIY printing part of the process, but it's not primarily about the economics. I fully endorse Kenneth Tanaka's comments on the previous thread. You have to print. The only question is how—outsourced or DIY? In addition to the cash budget, which you can redirect away from gear and towards printing as KT suggested, there's also the time budget. DIY takes up a chunk of your time in order to become part of the process. In that respect, inkjet is not so different from the darkroom, which is why some notable photographers outsourced. Including my eldest son. He has always told me that DIY printing is just a distraction, as well as a cash cost. But you, know what? Even he has just started DIY."

Dave millier: "Here's the real reason for DIY printing and it's nothing to do with cost. Since my R2400 broke for the last time a couple of years ago my photographic activity has reduced by 95%. Clearly, making prints was the core motivation. I need a new printer and I ought to sell my cameras if necessary to fund it."