I'm a digineg calibration queen

This week I decided to put aside creative work and get down and dirty with
making digital negatives. I had taken Mark Nelson's PDN workshop, seen
Sam's BW prints and Sandy's kallitype and pd prints from diginegs, had the
book laying in my "to do (to don't)" pile unread for months (not unusual for
me), and decided to plunge in. My impetus was to be able to use my digital
images in the BW darkroom for bromoil, and to learn a method for teaching
students how to make your own personal curves (that sounds like a do it
yourself breast implant infomercial).

As I usually never do anything small, I took it upon myself to calibrate 6
different enlarging papers, Forte, Bergger, Ilford, cold and warm. OH, and
did I say solarplate, palladium, cyanotype, and gum??? I am a nutcase. And
my open studio is this week so I have to show lots of Stouffers and tonal
palettes which won't impress anybody but Sam...

I just wanted to say that my very first palladium print WORKED, as well as
did my BW. I have not finished solarplate and the rest (will be printing
solarplate today). I must have been skeptical because I was shocked they
printed exactly what I saw on my monitor--even down to the crumminess of the
image! I chose it because it had an absolute white in it, lots of leafy
detail, and a large area of black which was a guy's polar fleece jacket who
was cooking beer can chicken (two chickens facing each other with beer cans
up their butts--only in America).

I admit, there were rough spots in the process. For one, I am not tech
queen. Two, I am on a PC, as some would say "PC challenged" and I had a hard
time finding some of the equivalent settings on the PC, but that was my
problem. Three, there is no index or table of contents in the book (Mark?).
At one point I felt like sitting on a beer can myself.

The most amazing thing, though, is through the process what you see on your
monitor is what you get--AND I was able to see the differences between BW
papers. Bergger is a gorgeous paper (VCCB). But this is an alt list...AND
the other most amazing thing is I never have to worry about if I change
printers, or monitors or whatever because now I know how to make my own
curves. I "put in my time" or "paid my dues" as they say.

I'm so excited about this I feel like a TV evangelist--you know, when you
finally understand the "Big Kahuna"???

Back to my cyanotype calibration now...
Chris
Received on Mon Feb 14 08:11:39 2005