Seven years ago I began doing Platinum/Palladium printing. Starting with
two and a
quarter negatives that I had shot and developed for silver printing. I
have had fair
success printing the more bulletproof of these negatives, usually poor
success (having
to add so much H2O2 or chlorate) in printing what were good silver negatives.
Then I began exposing my small negatives and using a hotter developer
more for
printing p/p. My results improved. Once I could get away from having to
add for contrast, my tone scales improved wonderfully. I was hooked.
Enlarged negatives,
whether on Ortho, or other materials, simply did not carry the tone range
that original
negatives have. On to 4/5, 8/10 and now I use 11x14 Wisner in doing platinum
portraiture.
Only on my strong days do I venture out with the 11x14. Its a lot of
camera but
the negative is a thing of beauty. Visit my site at
http://www.ibs-net.com/platinum.htm
I do not want to sound negative about enlarged negatives. For gum,
cyanotype and other processes it may work great, but when you want the
tones you hear
about from platinum/palladium, you need a good original negative to work from.
There was a gentleman who spoke of his dull palladium prints. Palladium is
low contrast to begin with, and with a negative developed for silver, its
probably pretty
ugly. Once you get a good negative, add a small amount of platinum ( 1 to 4
in the metal mix) to increase contrast and and your prints will sing. No
need to shellac platinum prints trying to make them look like silver.
Gary
>I do mostly dichromated gum, with incursions in carbon, cyanotype...all with
>moderate success. I'm a free-lance computers consultant, and I don't have
>_so_ much time left for photography. However, I enjoy it very much...
>
>I came out from lurking because of the proposed alt.book.
>
>I agree with Luis Nadeau in that one more book does no harm, quite the
>contrary. I have several of his books, but that don't stop me from also
>having Scopick's, "The makers of light" and many others. Each one of them
>has contributed some new idea. I also agree with him that it is _plenty_ of
>work.
>(BTW, Luis, just what are those new techniques that 99.8 of us haven't even
>heard of? Sounds fascinating. It's a secret? I've heard somewhere that
>instead of potassium dichromate some clever guys are actually using silver
>salts! My silver spoons get darker with time, now that I think of it...;-)
>
>Also, Judy Seigel's arguments cannot be easily dismissed:
>
>a.- Each of the contributors is to write an article 'ex nihilo', ignoring
>the wealth of material existent in the archives? But that is self-defeating,
>in a sense.
>
>b.- Ok, so we use the archives. But who is going to make the selection?
>Aside from the huge amount of work involved, most of the
>ideas/techniques/approaches proposed by some contributor to any one process
>have been dismissed at some other time by some _other_ contributor! Makes
>interesting reading, certainly, but how do you filter all this to make a
>_book_? And yes, as Judy says, how do you do this _and_ avoid inflicting
>deep wounds to everybody concerned?
>
>On the other hand, if the replaceable pages format is adopted as someone
>suggested, less filtering would be necessary: _all_ of the approaches to a
>given process could be distributed, and each one of us would keep only those
>that make sense to him. Less bloodshed this way, but utter confusion for
>beginners. Well, "tant pis pour les beginn=E8res", let them start with=
> another
>book! _This_ one could become a classic, emboding the marvelous and
>frightening anarchy implicit in the Net! Something in the vein of "Rayuela"
>by Julio Cortazar, only more up to date...
>
>Yes, I would buy this book, if it ever came out, even knowing beforehand all
>the trading off involved.
>
>Hovewer, in the meantime, I have a computer-oriented approach to cope with
>the information coming from the list. What I do is the following:
>
>0.- Delete personal messages, flames and other futile and irrelevant
>material (Excuse me please, futile and irrelevant to _me_ :-) This is a
>rather subjective step, which I'm tempted to skip, sometimes!
>
>1.- The message is preprocessed with a filter that takes out the header,
>leaving only the remittent, the subject, date and time, and the text.
>
>2.- The message is appended to previous ones on the same thread, making a
>file per thread. This could be changed, of course, perhaps having families
>of threads, but it would involve additional human labor.
>
>3.- The files that have changed are re-indexed. To this end, I use a public
>domain free-text database manager (there exist several).
>
>4.- The same database manager allows me to search words, phrases, logical
>combinations of these, and so on.
>
>5.- Once a year or so (I am not doing this, yet) the message files, together
>with the index file and the database manager could be written to a CD-ROM.
>This would be a terrible pilfering of resources: from September '95 up to
>today, all the messages, without any filtering, take up less than 4.5
>million characters. Perhaps the rate will be 6 or 7 million characters a
>year. A CD-ROM has a capacity of 600 Million chars. Oh, well, they come
>cheap these days...
>
>The first step is the only one to involve some work and judgment (_this_ is
>why I'm tempted to skip it), but it's only a few messages each day. If only
>I could identify automatically the flames, the personal communications,
>the...Perhaps if I mix in some text recognition techniques and some
>Artificial Intelligence? Yeah, it could work...
>
>Anyway, if somebody out there is interested in this approach, I'm more than
>willing to share experiences. Perhaps it would be possible to distribute a
>pre-cooked, working system to those interested.
>
>And sorry to have been a bore for all of you that are _not_ in computers! I
>agree that a book has something that a CD-ROM
>
>Tom Sobota
>
>Colombia 40, 5E
>28016 Madrid
>Spain.
>
>Phone +34(1)3592319
>Email canencia2@mad.servicom.es
>
>
>