Hedrich Blessing Report

[Kirk Gittings]

Hedrich Blesing in Chicago has been at the leading edge of commercial architectural photography for 80 years. They are a great bell weather of real changes in the genre as they are conservative technically and don't follow fads. Every year I take my arch. photo class from the Art Institute on a fields trip to Hedrich Blesssing and use the trip to see how they are responding to the digital developements. This year an extraordinary young photographer, Jeff Millies, gave us the tour and showed us his work. This is where they are at:

Overwhelmingly they are shooting 4x5 trans. film, primarily Kodak EPN and Velvia and swear that as long as film is being made they will shoot it.

But everything is being scanned on Imacons and delivered as film or with scans and digital contact prints. The traditional printing darkrooms and C print processors are idle. Most of their clients don't know what to do with film anymore. They need digital files. The magazines and book publishers still want original film usually. Film is sent out to a lab. Their famous retouching is being done on original trans. when needed but primarily on scans via photoshop.

A very few down and dirty or low budjet jobs are being shot with digital capture, exclusively on the high end Canons with PC lenses. These use these for scouting shots too.

They are building a new facility out of the Loop where they will have better access which and will eliminate the traditional darkrooms in favour of computer work stations.

They are always very gracious and sharing. They have the confidence of artists who are at the top of their game and not worried about competition. We will try and get them to present at the View Camera Conference in Chicago next year.

Their digital evolution is about what I expected. Two years ago they started scanning film for particular clients who requested it and now everything is scanned.

[paulr]

I worked full time in design and print production until this year, and noticed that magazines are increasingly expecting digital files. Some of them accept film, others accept film but with a hefty surcharge, and others don't accept it at all. The trend has been towards magazines only accepting ads in hi-res PDF format. After working with this for a while, the reason became clear: it offloads all the prepress work from them to the customers. They send you instructions (sometimes pages of cryptic settings and links to downloadable preference files), and you have to figure it out. If something goes wrong, hey--you did it, not them. It's simple economics for them. Less work, less responsibility, the same money.

I do think quality is better when a real prepress person works on it, looking at a real match print, but this isn't an analog vs. digital issue, it's a time and money issue.

[Mike Butler]

Kirk,

Thanks for that report. I work for an architecture/interior design magazine (as an editor) and the work of Hedrich Blessing is very familiar to me, but I haven't kept up to date on what they're doing techologically.

High res digital files are making inroads in our magazine for smaller shots and droputs. But our art director wants transparencies for the important stuff. I have noticed more 4x5 film trickle in the past year or so, primarily from food photographers, but I think a lot of that is being done for the artistic/selective focus effect than for the quality of the film itself.

[Mark_3632]

So?

[Sal Santamaura]

What's a "digital contact print?"

[Antonio Corcuera]

Like Mike Butler, I also work as an editor, in an architecture/interior design book publisher. 3-4 years ago submissions were 80% transparencies v/s 20% digital. Although we stress on our preference on transparencies, today it's more of a 50/50. In most cases, scans are just acceptable (our books are no larger than 10x12"), even from reputed photographers.

[tim atherton]

Sal,

A negative which is then scanned, enlarged (usually), adjusted (all the adjustments for contrast, shadow and highlight, spotting etc that may be needed) then printed on either an inkjet printer on transparency film or via an imagesetter (the former obviously being more small scale setup friendly) and then, using this as the contact printing negative, printed on whatever your choice of materials/processes - POP, Pt/Pd, Azo, silver gelatin etc etc.

There is a pretty steep learning curve on calibrating your materials.

Burkholders book/method is one approach, Mark Nelsons approach/procedures are much more detailed and individually calibrated for inks/transparency material/final process choice

Sandy King is doing a lot of this I believe with Platinum and some other processes.

Some are also enlarging files from digital cameras up to 8x10 and making contact prints - I haven't personally seen any of these and I'm not sure how well it's working (possibly pretty well).

Others are taking say a hi-res scan from an 8x10 negative and making say 12x16 digital contact negs (or bigger). These tend to look very good from what I have seen (and is something I am slowly working on using Nelsons method)

It's something that has actually been done for a good number of years with imagesetters, with some people who make large sized platinum prints and othe alt processes - but that usually required having a service bureo with a multi thousand dollar image setter that was willing to put up with your peculiar requests - the inkjet method can be done on a desktop

[Kirk Gittings]

Sal,
Sorry if I was unclear. I was actually just refering to the automated Contact Sheet II from a folder generated from the File>automate>contact sheet II thing in PS.

[tim atherton]

"Sal, Sorry if I was unclear. I was actually just refering to the automated Contact Sheet II from a folder generated from the File>automate>contact sheet II thing in PS."

Doh...

[Sal Santamaura]

Tim, thanks for trying; I'm aware of all the Burkholder/King/etc. work and didn't think that was what Kirk was referring to.

Kirk, you weren't unclear. I'm just PS-illiterate. Thanks for explaining.

[tim atherton]

the moral of the story being - don't try and read and reply to posts while wrangling the 18 month old... (see my arca post for more)

[chris_4622]

Does anyone know the dates of the View Camera Conference next year? I hope it is in the spring, it is usually great weather at that time of year here.

[Kirk Gittings]

I don't think the date has been picked yet though Steve is talking about the spring again.