Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/08/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]A few weeks ago I was sitting in my mother's living room at her summer house in Maine, looking at the West wall, which is covered with family pictures. Mostly group pictures, mostly 11x14 and 16x20. The oldest is from 1934 and the newest is from 2009. I spent a lot of time looking at them, studying them, remembering where each of them came from, thinking about the event at which that picture was taken. I printed about half of those pictures. The others were either printed by commercial photographers or by my mother, who is a skilled printer and who taught me most of what I know about darkroom printing. The prints before 1970 are all black-and-white. Starting in 1970 there are some of each, and everything since 1990 is color. The 3 most recent prints are all inkjet; all of the others are from a darkroom. The older prints are mostly on Agfa Indiatone Brilliant; the B&W prints from the 1960s to the 1990s are all on Kodak Polycontrast G. The inkjet prints are all on Hahnem?hle Photo Rag and Museo Silver Rag with Epson pigment inks. The darkroom color prints that I made are all on E-surface Ektacolor and Endura papers; I don't know what the pro labs used. My feeling after studying these prints for a long time was that the inkjet prints are the best of the lot; they have a warmth and life to them that is better than any of the silver prints. I don't think that this is because of deterioration of the older prints -- these have been kept out of the sun, and there are a number of extra prints kept in a drawer to which I made spot comparisons. Part of it is that Photoshop gives me more nuanced control printing than I ever had in the darkroom. And part of it is that the pigment-on-baryta imaging is just a wonderful way of making this kind of images. It might be that if I took pictures of mountains or ducks or buildings or national forests, that inkjet papers wouldn't be as good. But I take pictures of people, and I think that modern inkjet papers with modern inkjet printers are the best imaging system ever sold commercially.