Inkjet better than wet prints yet?

[Vaughn]

Good for you-a unique and memorable experience. He is a modern master.

At our first class critique, he almost threw me out of his class...my fault. Fortunately a couple other students stood up for me. Both Thomas and I had to work to regain each others trust and as a result developed a stronger relationship.

He is a true teacher -- not just an instructor.

To answer your question below...Just a bad choice of words on my part. He would fail any student that did not come to a class critique. Our first assignment was a self-portrait assignment, which I was not comfortable with. I came to the critique without any prints and told him right before the class started. He asked why, and I said, "I could not get into it."

So he started out the class period very upset and being very intense said that anyone unwilling to put the most into the class and blows off doing the work (looking at me) should leave, now. Unfortunately, I meant that I had tried to do the assignment and I was not satisfied with any of the work I had done.

Since Thomas is very verbose and deep, his critiques (a class of 18 or so students) took two 3-hour class periods, so I was able to complete the assignment before the second round of the critique. He gave me a B+ for it -- I still have it, and still can not read most of his comments that he wrote on the back of the mounted print...LOL!

[Kirk Gittings]

Hmmm you are leaving out the why...

[paulr]

But basically, inkjet paper without any precious metal or gelatin sells for as much or more as what we traditionally pay for papers with them. It's an obscenely profitable commodity.

Drew, I find it impossible to believe that you're not smarter than this argument. Do you know anything about the cost of manufacture or R&D for these materials? Have you researched the profit margins? Do you know what the actual value of the silver is in a sheet of gelatin silver paper? (hint: close to zero).

At any rate, the idea that the price of art is somehow correlated in any major way with the cost of commodity materials is odd. What's the value of the pigment in a Picasso painting?

If you want to invest in silver, invest in silver.

[Lenny Eiger]

Well they certainly are cheap to make. Not labor intensive either. Just make one, store it in the computer and, when someone wants to purchase it, you just need to hit the print button and out one (or 100!) comes! How easy is that? You don't even need storage: the computer will store zillions of them using not more than a cubic foot of floor space. Cheap!!! But I wouldn't tell your clients how easy and cheap it is if I were you. No sir, I'd tell them how much better they are than the "old" silver process, how you slaved for years (was that 6 that I heard?) to learn to print with the inkjet, how expensive that ink really is...because you sure don't want to go back to the silver process when you have it so easy, do you?

Thomas

Yea, only if you are a hack.

If you don't see how things change over time, different temperatures and humidities, variations in coatings, then you can hit the print button and just take what you get....

Anyone that thinks that silver is the old process is kidding themselves. If you want something older, print in albumen. Maybe make a daguerrotype... Platinum would be too modern. Its a ridiculous argument...

Lenny

[Drew Wiley]

Gosh you miss the point, Paul. A picasso collage made with newprint falling apart might sell
for tens of thousands, and then require thousands more to stabilize. The original materials
are basically worthless. But everybody knows about inks and printers and the paper that goes with them. Not much different than an office printer, where the markup on the ink is staggering percentage-wise and it can take hundreds of dollars to refill. R&D on the popular
stuff has probably been recovered way back. Gelatin and silver are traditionally what made
paper expensive - now you pay more for the paper plus nothing but sizing. You still have to have something like that before you even coat. Silver negligible???????? Ever hear of the Hunt Bros and how they almost turned photography into a train wreck via silver speculation? Buy any gold chloride lately?

[Drew Wiley]

Lenny - I love the look of albumen. Now there's an idea if you have space out back for a
henhouse. Gets around the gelatin issue. I've collected a number of those prints and they
seem quite permanent if protected from dampness and mold. Wonder if the technique could be get onto the cooking channel? Julia Child could have given a demo, maybe with
a little pulverized escargot as extra binder.

[Greg Lockrey]

Well they certainly are cheap to make. Not labor intensive either. Just make one, store it in the computer and, when someone wants to purchase it, you just need to hit the print button and out one (or 100!) comes! How easy is that? You don't even need storage: the computer will store zillions of them using not more than a cubic foot of floor space. Cheap!!! But I wouldn't tell your clients how easy and cheap it is if I were you. No sir, I'd tell them how much better they are than the "old" silver process, how you slaved for years (was that 6 that I heard?) to learn to print with the inkjet, how expensive that ink really is...because you sure don't want to go back to the silver process when you have it so easy, do you?

Thomas

Yeah.... why all the fuss.... it's just a print after all.

[mcfactor]

For color, yes, for black and white, it depends.

[Drew Wiley]

Personal preferences. But the very best color inkjet printers I know (won't give names - but they'd be on anyone's A list of "experts" at it) - well, I think they themselves made better color prints to old chemical way. The reasons for switching are various. Quality becomes a plastic definition, just like format. As technology changes, supplies come and
go, and as one simply ages and needs simplification ... or maybe we all need a change of
pace just for its own sake.... I really don't care. Make an intelligent choice then go master the medium you prefer, and that will make a far bigger dent in actual quality than trying to decide the ultimate merits of this or that. It's just a damn game anyway. Nobody four hundreds years from now is going to mistake any of our work for the ceiling of the Sistine.

[tgtaylor]

“Talk is cheap!” “Where's the beef?”

I think that people who promote one over the other should post an example of what they are saying instead of merely mouthing off. I, for one, print both traditionally and now ink-jet and can truly say that I prefer the former over the latter and have posted numerous examples of my work on this forum.

For example I scanned and printed this yesterday on my now outdated Epson scanner and printer and am quite proud of it:



In fact I may reprint it at 13x19 for a wall.

A few weeks back I printed this image from Yosemite Park in late December in my “darkroom;”



This is a poor scan of the print which I am holding in my hand – for some reason I scanned it too dark because the actual work print is bright and “snappy”– and I can truthfully say that I like it better than the color ink-jet above notwithstanding the latter’s more dramatic (in my opinion) landscape. Additionally the B&W has a certain look to it that reminds me of the old movie stills from my childhood. It even has a different “feel” to the paper that I like. I'm really beginning to like Oriental RC and at just 50 cents a sheet you can't go wrong with this paper. In fact I will reprint this tonight at 16x20 for a LR wall with a little more dodge on the treeline, stream side, and immediate foreground on the right hand side.

But most of the above is subjective. A more objective difference between the two is when you turn the B&W print sideways the darker parts of the print do not 'standout” as in the ink-jet print, nor do the sharp separations between , say, the mountain tops.

Personally I like both methods but lean more heavily towards the darkroom.

Thomas