Laser Printing is Dead. Long Live Laser Printing.

I went through a short [Edit, LONG] period of time that I spent trying to inject... something... into my prints. I love inkjet printing with a passion, it's one of my favorite processes. It's really in many respects the perfect output method for modern photographs. With a color calibrated monitor and a tidy color workflow, both in post and in printing, it is incredibly precise. A part of me feels a little bit reactionary to all of this modern photographic perfection. Some of my favorite photographs are not perfect, not exact, not sterile. This probably hearkens back to some of my early experiences with hand coated processes and even darkroom printing. I love them for the un-exactness. Sorry Ansel, but the zone system gives me headaches. I just don't think logarithms and algorithms have much of a place in the dark room. I think printing should come from a warmer place, like the Heart.

Me with a laser print collage

Some of the prints I admire the most are not "technically" perfect.

The Pond - Moonlight, by Edward Steichen is a great example. Steichen printed first in Platinum and then added layers of gum bichromate to give the slight impression of color in the image. Gum bichromate is one of the more difficult proccesses to acheive technical perfection with, but it is apparent that Steichen's use of this process was not about technical perfection. It is about mood, an effervecence that can't be replicated with silver. By the way, Steichen's masterpiece sold recently for 2.9 million dollars.

The Pond - Moonlight, Edward Steichen, 1904, gum bichromate over platinum print

The Starn Twins are two of my favorite photographers right now too, I love their exploration of materials and techniques, and their overall philosophy towards printing.

When I was thinking about changing directions, I looked around me towards what was cheap and familiar. That old laser printer sitting in the corner? Really? Yes!

Leaf, laser print

For a series of prints of leaf negatives that I was working on, laser worked pretty darn good! The leaves were photographed digitally and processed to make them negative and give them a high contrast, and then printed using, yes, the good old laser printer. The printed page has some pretty interesting qualities, some imperfections yes, some resolution issues, yes, but over all they work. As a bonus when printing a large number of prints, laser was much, much faster then working with inkjet, thanks to its speedy thermal process. This allowed for printing multiple sheet collages in a relatively short amount of time. I created a series of 300 leaf prints like the one above over a few days.

Collection of Leafs, laser print

Fern, collage of laser prints

Maple Leaf, collage of laser prints

I enjoyed this process so much that I even went on to use if for one of my final projects. I don't expect to start a laser printer revival with this one, but I would implore creative printers to think beyond simply defaulting to inkjet!

Portrait Printing Study

What's the best way to print a portrait? You probably know where this one is heading... It all depends!

This is a portrait of my friend Meg taken originally shot with a 4x5 camera on Ilford Delta 100 film. This is a great film for large format work in general, but especially so if you are planing on scanning your film. It has a great latitude in exposure, development and in scanning, has great resolution and a tight grain pattern that make it great for enlarging or large format inkjet prints.

4x5in negative

The exposure was made, the film developed normally in the dark room using trays, and allowed to dry. The negative was scanned using a 4x5 drum scanner at a high resolution, giving me a nice big file to play around with. At the time the final print was made on an Epson 4880 on a basic luster inkjet paper. The results were good.

13x19 inket print

Fast forward a few months and I began to experiment with the outstanding platinum/palladium process. The process lends itself quite naturally to printing portraits, as it has some really great visual qualities. Pt/Pd has a very large dynamic range, and has a very soft, almost velvety low contrast quality. The color can be varied by changing the mixture ratio of platinum vs palladium, ranging from a cool, metallic look from all platinum to a nice warm, rich tone with all palladium. Pt/Pd prints are also some of the most permanent object on earth, with the two elements being very stable over long periods of time.

4x5 in Platinum/Palladium print on marker paper

A Pt/Pd mixture is carefully (this stuff is expensive!) brush coated on to a piece of paper, in this case a beautiful, semi translucent marker paper, allowed to dry and then humidified. A negative is placed on the coated paper and put inside of a contact printing frame. I use a Bostick and Sullivan model which is built very well and works wonderfully, and I know it will be around for many years to come. Bostick and Sullivan are also a wonderful source for ingredients and information The contact frame is placed inside of an exposure box and exposed to UV light. Set your timer, remove the negative from the print and develop the print normally. Viola.

This platinum/palladium portrait of my friend Meg is one my favorite prints that I have ever made. The marker paper feels lovely in your hands, and the semi-translucent quality is awesome, and gives some creative leeway for mounting and framing. The image itself has a gorgeous color, like a subtle sepia tone, is tack sharp (thanks to the contact print) and has a delicious and subtle low-contrast tonal range that works excellent with the desired mood of the photo. I love the brush strokes that indicate this is a hand made object, some people hate this look, to each his own, the strokes can easily be covered up when using a matte.

Lastly, for comparisons sake is a digital file taken from my Nikon D80 while trying to determine the correct exposure and metering for the large format camera.

RAW file from Nikon D80

So which is the best? Again, there is no right answer. My personal preference is for the Platinum/Palladium print. Its visual qualities are outstanding to me, and best mimic the mood that I was trying to create with this portrait. It does have it's downsides though, you are limited in the various sizes that you can print in, if the negative is 4x5, you're stuck with at that size... sorta. In further posts I'll be talking about creating digital negatives that allow you to have much more flexibility in working with hand-coated processes.

The Platinum/Palladium printing process also has a prestigious history. An examination of the history of the process is a veritable who's-who of important fine art portrait photography.

Don't miss: Platinotype, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston.

Dan Burkholder is a wonderful contemporary photographer and platinum printer.

DSLR captured RAW file to 3 pass litho print!

This little guitar holding, wine bottle Hombre was originally captured with a Nikon D80 a while back while I was visiting Spain. The original file was cleaned up in Photoshop, cropped, and corrected for exposure. The colors are quite punchy and vivid, which I think helps add to the simple graphic like quality of the photo. This guy looked like a great candidate for a litho print.

The file was re-sized and the color channels were separated into three separate layers (black, red and blue) as this would be a three pass litho print. From there, three polyester pronto plates were printed, one for each of the colors with the help of a laser printer. From there the plates were printed using a printing press. The ink is mixed, rolled on to the plate, and then the plate run through the press with your choice of paper. The processes is repeated once for each plate, taking care with regard to the registration of the plates. I chose to print on a fairly thin, beige-ish Eastern paper with a semi loose grain.



Give the print time to dry, and viola! The litho printing process is quite fun, but requires a bit of practice to get things just right. I really enjoy this print, it has a cool vintage vibe, maybe like a poster from the old West. The colors are much more muted then it's digital cousin, but again I think helps give it an old-timey feel. If you ever get a chance to give litho printing a try, I highly recommend it! It's a blast to get your hands dirty and try out older and alternative processes. Litho can also be printed using a four pass method utilizing a CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) method, which makes printing full color prints fairly easy. Lithography is a fascinating processes, and has strong artistic roots. It has been used (and perfected) by many masters, including Picasso, Matisse, Escher and Hockney.

More on Lithographic Process

Offset Printing

Photographic Printing Possibilities

What comes to mind when you think about printing a photograph? The question is deceivingly simple. The context in which the question is asked is paramount to your answer. Older folks might think of taking 35mm film to the local drugstore to get 4x6 color prints (some younger folks might not even remember this!), those with some photographic experience might include printing 35mm black and white film with an enlarger. More recently ink jet technology has allowed for a whole new level of flexibility and choices. Most people can plug a digicam into a home inkjet printer and make lovely prints up to around 8.5x11. Fine art printers today can make delicious large format inkjet prints on large format printers with ease, and printers are getting faster every generation.

So whats the best path for outputting your images? It all depends!




The print below is a great example of the vast options available. The finished print is a series of 9, 8x8 lithographic prints on fine art silk printing paper using a monochrome ink. The semi-transparent silk tissue paper is adhered over top of an identical black and white inkjet print, printed on Epson matte paper. The 9 prints are arranged together and viewed as one image.





This print took quite a path to get to this point! It's an older image that I had taken during a black and white film photo class, so it started off as a good old 35mm negative on Ilford Delta 100 film. From that point it was printed in the dark room via enlarger onto an 8x10 piece of Ilford silver gelatin photo paper, and was put through standard development.

The print at this point was lovely, and I decided it would be a good candidate image for a lithography project. The 8x10 silver print was scanned at a high resolution and divided up into 9 even sections to make it more fit on the lithography pronto plates. Each of the 9 pronto plates was printed on a lazer printer. From this point, each of the plates was printed onto the silk tissue paper using the lithography process, and a printing press. Then each litho print was carefully cut to size so that no border remained. The same files used to printing the litho plates were used to print a black and white inkjet print which was also trimmed to size. At this point I had 9 blue litho prints, and 9 matching black and white inkjet prints. The silk paper was carefully glued on top of the inkjet print and hung together to form a single print.

Whew! Why go through all the trouble? The final piece has some beautiful and very unique characteristics that make it hard to achieve with any other method. The fine art silk tissue paper is a super thin, very lightweight semi transparent paper. The lithographic printing process is done by hand and ads a tactile characteristic to the print. The silk tissue is so light and glued in such a way that just the ambient movement of the air from the air conditioner is enough to make it sway just a bit, and give a superb shimmering effect to the print. Litho inks are also quite beautiful and have a different richness to them vs inkjet inks.

So there! There are so many different ways to approach the printing of a photograph!

Be This Way:

Sebring Pt. 2 - Shoot the Sunset

The sunset at Sebring is very beautiful, and presents many different shooting possibilities. As the sun was getting low, I still wasn't sure whether I was going to shoot the sunset at the hairpin turn or along the front straight. Both are beautiful in the sunset light, and I was at the hairpin at the time.

I got some of my favorite shots of the race during the golden hour.

Sebring Pt. 1 - Think Different

In the photographic world, almost everything has been done before. It's hard to do something really different. On the first day that I got to Sebring, I was feeling a little stale, and not in a creative frame of mind to be taking really good pictures. So as I was moping around the track, I decided to try and do something different. There are many, many awesome motorsports photographers out there, and most of them are getting similar images. I know I don't have the experience to go toe to toe and get better "typical" racing pictures. I think that I do have the ability to bring my own vision to the ring, and shoot things a little different.



This shot was taken on the inside of turn 17 at Sebring, one of my favorite corners at the track. The drivers have just finished the longest straightaway on the track, and take a sweeping right hander at very high speed, and then go under a bridge. The cars come VERY close to the wall at 17, sometimes within three or four feet from the concrete barrier that photographers stand behind. The light at this time was not very flattering, and my head on and panning shots of the cars were looking flat, and I didn't really feel like walking to another part of the track, so I decided to try something different. Creating framing within shots is one of my favorite techniques, so I decided to give it a whirl. The concrete barriers have small breaks at the bottom of them, just big enough to fit a camera in. So I stuck one of my cameras in the hole, and shot the cars through it as they drove by. This was really tough, as the cars were driving probably 135 MPH at this point. It took about 10 minutes of squating down, trying to watch the cars coming by, and timing everything just right to get them in the little frame. It worked, and this turned about to be one of my favorite shots from the race. I've never seen a photo like this before, so it's cool to think that this might be a pure original.

Don't forget to think different, and never be afraid to try out new things. The pro photographers that were around and watching me probably thought I was nuts, but it worked!

Here are a few more shots that I thought were a little different: