acavan@suika
Date: 03/02/03-09:59:12 AM Z
>I've counted, now, about 30 of us--out of 600 that still isn't very many
depending on your definition of gum printer (gummer?) it may be 31. i subscribed to the list to learn more about gum printing having done it in a class setting sometime toward the end of the 1980's and then again late last year. i think it was judy that said gum printers start with a measure of success which hooks them in and then learn the foibles of the process. this has certainly been my experience.
in the first class i had a handful of digital negatives and had never even heard of gum printing and was able to produce four prints that i was pleased with. the second time i read everything i could about the gum process and digital negatives. armed with a variety of inkjet digital negatives the best i could do was learn a lot.
if anyone is interested, scans of those first gum prints are at:
http://www.sixtwentyeight.com/gum/html/index.htm
if you have bandwidth/processor concerns, each image's hover text tells you the download and memory size of image the link points to. the largest version of each is the original 300dpi scan. the scans are pretty close but, as someone pointed out, gum prints don't seem to fare well when scanned.
at the time these prints were made (1988?) i was working for barneyscan. we were making the first 35mm slide scanner and later the first 4x5 desktop scanner. for $15,000 you could buy a printer that didn't do as nice a job as a $49 epson printer today. the first three prints were scanned from 35mm slides and manipulated to varying degrees in a pre-production version of barneyscan xp (the precursor to photoshop. if only we had invested in buying the rights to photoshop rather than making hardware...). the negatives were output on a tekronix printer a 300dpi thermal transfer device.
the two pottery prints are not from my photographs but from work that harry bowers was doing on an error diffusion screening algorithm. his algorithm was supposed to allow billboard sized images to be made from a 35mm slide. the negatives for these prints were output on a linotronic imagesetter (you can see the artifacts in the last print which was output at the imagesetter's maximum resolution). the detail print was made from 3 negatives of a cmyk set. i had never heard the term 'stochastic screening' before reading dan burkholder's book but the negatives certainly appear to be closely related. if anyone knows more about what happened to harry bowers' work please do let me know.
i found this list via the archives when i was trying to understand the application of spectral negatives in a uv process. in preparing my assorted desktop negatives i was wondering if it was accurate to assume that a negative the color of rubylith would have the same uv transmission properties. while i have read posts wondering the same thing, if the definitive answer was posted i missed it - and if it was posted, please do point me to it.
as to the issue of whether to count me as a gum printer, i can say that i am slowly putting a gum lab together so i can approach the process with a bit more science than a class setting permits. until then, i certainly appreciate the caliber of this list and look forward to applying what i've been learning from all of you.
regards,
adam
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