diginegs a la Mark Nelson

Haven't been great about keeping up on email lately, with my 30 hour review
looming this next week, but I wanted to share one thing (I'm such a
blabbermouth--should've been a gossip columnist). Yesterday during our
weekly crit I saw Sam Wang's SILVER prints from a contact digineg, made
using Mark Nelson's neg procedure, and was absolutely shocked. The creamy
tonality, sharpness, no grain, was really impressive. It made me a
believer. Jeffrey Mathias, you are one that does not think diginegs are
there yet? I'd love to have you see this. Epson 2200 printer.

Sam also brought platinum prints which were equally gorgeous. These were
flesh things (both platinum and the gelatin silver) and the flesh was soft
and high key. Wonderful tonal gradation. Hmm..."flesh things" is not very
eloquent, I must be brain dead. But although I loved the pt/pd ones, I am
not a good judge of them as I don't do the process enough to spot a perfect
one. BW is another story.

The intriguing thing about it is that once you have scanned and adjusted
your neg to the [silver, pt/pd] curve, Sam said all your negs print exactly
the same. That would save me hours in the darkroom getting perfectly dodged
and burned prints.

I wish I had stock or a vested interest in Mark's product, but I don't, as
nice as his hehehe's are. (and just because I'm bragging about Sam's prints
isn't earning me review brownie points, either. I'm so sick of rewriting my
artist statement I could puke). Needless to say I'm going to learn this
method shortly.

My thought is that $75 is a small price to pay for consistency with prints,
both silver and pt/pd, as well as gum. I mean, gum can mask some of those
digineg problems, but not bw prints. On Forte paper. Toned. Yum. Hot
darn.
Chris
Received on Wed Sep 1 20:11:52 2004