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.

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!