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!