Re: I'm a digineg calibration queen

Chris,

You must be about half mad trying to calibrate so many processes at once!!

I spent the last week calibrating PDN for carbon printing and finally
got it down yesterday and was able to make a few prints. The PDN went
well but after an absence from carbon printing of several months I
made a lot of process mistakes that made me have to repeat a lof of
the steps. In any event, printing carbon with digital negatives has
a very big advantage over in-camera negatives in that one can flip
the negative in setting it up and use the single transfer method of
carbon, which is of course much easier to work than double transfer.
Reversing in-camera negatives does not work well because it results
in quite a bit of loss in image sharpness.

Sandy

>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 11:15:15 2005