Eliot Porter

[Drew Wiley]

Joe - he wasn't just an apprentice; he actually printed much of Eliot's later work. But
his attitude toward DT and just about anyone involved with it has been quite grumpy
lately, and he tried to sell off all his gear not long ago. Apparently just couldn't move
on when Kodak pulled the plug on their own mfg of the relevant materials. Bill - excellent in-camera separations can be made using TMax films (IF you know the right
dev tricks; but scanning and PS corrections can be used for linearity in several current
films - but then you need either an imagesetter or high-end film recorder to generate
corrected separations). Another myth is than only Pan Masking film can be used for
masking, when there are actually better options at the moment.

[Joe Forks]

Drew,
Sorry to hear about the attitude. But good on you, the old saying applies, - when the going gets tough, the tough get going..... There are a lot of us here that will endure even if we have to find new ways of doing things.

[Alan Curtis]

Drew
Maybe you know more about Jim Bones now than I do. I taught LF workshops with Jim in in the 90's and thought that his Dye Transfer photographs were of the finest quality I had seen. IMO he printed Eliot Porter's photographs better than he did. Jim was not just an assistant, he took over all the printing of Eliot's photographs in the late 70's and 80's.I think Jim was the last person working with Eliot before he died. Jim was was an under study with Russell Lee at the University of Texas before going to work with Eliot. I know that when Kodak was stopping production DT materials Jim went in to serious debt to stock pile DT materials. Jim is very politically directed so I don't know what his attitude is now, I have not been in contact with him in several years, unfortunately . His photographs are still of some of the best environmental landscapes we have seen and one of the last masters of Dye Transfer printing. My father was one of the first in the early 1950's.

[Drew Wiley]

There are still two people doing small dye transfer prints commercially in this country, plus a number of individual printers worldwide. I can only dabble with the
process before I retire, because it's so labor intensive, and then will have only
enough supplies to last about two or three years of serious printing. But that's OK. For all practical purposes, modern digital printing techniques have taken over;
but when a particular DT print hits the bullseye, there's nothing quite like it.

[mrladewig]

The early books which made his reputation are among the finest color reproductions
I've even seen published and were very expensive books at the time. The separations were made from the original transparencies and by some are believed
to be superior to his dye transfer prints. I hope you are not confusing these first run
books with the less expensive later editions of the same popular titles, which were vastly inferior. The pages on the early books were individually varnished, though in some cases the varnish has yellowed. You simply do not get that kind of quality in today's self-published books either, at least not in color. Many of the plates were hand-tuned by craftsmen with considerable experience, and it really shows.

Indeed they are. I have first editions of In Wildness and The Place No One Knew and they are among the very best color printed books I have ever seen. I'm fortunate that both have very limited yellowing in the varnish. They are certainly much better than his later books, which are printed in more modern cost effective methods, but not nearly the same print quality and attention to detail as the earlier books. I really like the content of Iceland, but its not printed as well as the others.

[pdmoylan]

Has anyone in this community attempted to us 4x5 with flash and slow ASA color film (he started with ASA 10 and KMII) to photograph small birds at the nest? Though this type of imagery has been made much easier throughout the years, most particularly with digital imaging, and others have attempted to match it using Hasselblads and sonar lenses, some of Porter's images have never been matched.

Alan Cruikshank was perhaps the first to use a speed graphic with longer lens to photograph birds in B&W, but it wasn't until Porter's color images that the genre gained notoriety.