Digital Negatives / Contact Printing

[Josh Divack]

Is anyone using Burkholder's methods to make digitial negatives for Platinum/Pal ladium contact printing? I am especially interested in his technique of printin g spectral density negatives onto transparency material using the Epson 6-color printer. What are your experiences?

I am also interested in finding out what scanning method people are using for th eir 4x5 negatives and transparencies. Burkholder suggests that a relatively low resolution (small file size) is quite adequate for these purposes.

Thanks.

[Ed Farmer]

I have purchased and read the book. Just got Photoshop installed. Haven't done any work yet. Actually, I am leaning toward Carbon and cyanotype prints over platinum. But, the whole thing looks pretty interesting.

[Brian Ellis]

There has been a lot of discussion about this in the alternative process news group, which you should be able to retrieve in the archives. To subscribe to the group, send an e mail to alt-photo- process-request@sask.usask.ca, and in the body of the message (not the subject line) type subscribe alt-photo-process-l. That last digit is the letter el, not the number one. Hopefully I've got the address and message right. I've read Dan Burkholder's book but haven't actually tried to make the negatives because my computer only has 64 megs of RAM. From reading other people's experiences, and from talking with a very computer knowledgeable friend who's working on it, I think this is a process that takes a lot of Photoshop knowledge and a lot of work if you're going to try to make the negatives on your home printer. My personal opinion is that we're still a couple years away from being able to do this at home with any degree of convenience and ease but that's just my relatively uninformed opinion.

[n.lacoe]

I'm glad to find you. I started out with Burkholder's books and curves for my nudes. It isn't feasible to photograph living, moving persons with large format in the landscape, so I work with my Rollei 120 and a 35. I want to take these as large as 20x24. I find Dan's curve too harsh for most of my nudes, so have been working out a curve for types of images (backlighted, front-lighted, etc.). I've made about 75 images through service bureaus, three of them usable; partly my fault, party inconsistency in production. I'm about to invest in an epson system. I'd like to hear from others. Norm La Coe