[Leica] AA or Uncle Earl?

[kcarney1 at cox.net (Ken Carney)]

On 8/1/2010 4:18 PM, Mark Rabiner wrote:
> Once you have a larger sized sheet film neg in your hands you have a slew 
> of
> so called "alternate" processes to choose from at the top of the list tends
> to be Platinum. And silver gelatin is on the list for sure.
> People, including E Weston who were were just talking about enlarged to
> 8x10.
> But that's a loss of a generation.
>
> When you simply "output to film negative" in effect from a Photoshop file 
> it
> does not feel like you are adding a generation to the process. You don't
> feel like you're loosing anything in a translation or transformation.
>
>
>
>    
If I thought I would make a pt/pd contact print, I would develop the 
negative for a high dmax, usually in one of the pyro developers such as 
PMK or Rollo.  Usually I could also make a silver print with grade 0 or 
1 paper or filtered equivalent, but not always.  I tried the inkjet negs 
but without a lot of success.  I'm skeptical that they would ever work 
well with silver, a much more demanding process because of the detail 
the paper can capture (as compared to papers used for alt processes).  
But, it would be neat if it worked out - sort of the best of both 
worlds.  Imagine making an 11x14 neg from a digital image to contact 
print on palladium or platinum or both, where you don't even need a 
darkroom for printing.

Ken Carney