[Leica] RE: Digital FIBER Prints

[puff11 at comcast.net (Norm Aubin)]

Mark,

I have to agree whole-heartedly - papers like Sommerset Velvet are
fantastic.  Bergger is offering their photographic papers uncoated and with
no emulsion for digital uses, and there are a great number of companies
offering papers that are true rag papers for use in inkjet printers.  

You can go to your nearest fine art supply store and buy any number of
papers - rice papers, canvas, most anything you'd like and in any of a
hundred colors and textures and weights, all useable for inkjet.  Those
water color guys have been holding out on us!

Then there's inks - MIS quad tones - Piezo inks (so to speak), EPSON inks,
and others yet.  So how do you sort this all out?  At least with papers you
can see a lot of other folks work and get a feel for what the papers look
like - and what the various developers do to those papers.  

Here in this brave new world of infinite possibilities it's daunting - at
least in the fiber world we had the works of a generation or two of
photographers helping us sort the wheat from the chaff.  Now we have to
start over: it's exciting, but it's time consuming and fraught with lots of
ways to fail.  

I'm on that voyage now - I've converted to digital output exclusively, and I
can see that it will eventually work for much of what I want to do.  Still,
there are times when I know I can get to where I want to be faster by going
into a wet darkroom, and there are times when I know exactly how to get what
I want in silver or platinum, and am not yet convinced it's possible in
inkjet.

On your other posting you talked of silver needing to be as glossy as
possible without it being glaring!  I guess I still like matte paper behind
museum glass over glossy behind glass when it comes to conveying depth and
subtle shadow detail.  If the print is open matted, no glass, then I have to
agree - I loved Kodak's Elite for the brief time it was available.  Never
could get enamored of Gallerie or Seagull.

The new Bergger graded papers are my favorite these days - in Dektol or
Beers split developed.

I do hope to get to stop in your studio and buy you a beer a'fore you move
to the big apple (don't mind the maggots), when is that going to happen?

Best of light -
Norm
     




> From: Mark Rabiner <mark@rabinergroup.com>
> Subject: Re: [Leica] Digital FIBER prints
> To: Leica Users Group <lug@leica-users.org>
> Message-ID: <BF98750D.1E51C%mark@rabinergroup.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;     charset="ISO-8859-1"
> 
> If one craves one daily fiber like I do the way to fly might surprisingly
be
> digital and inkjet desktop.
> The papers made for digital printing come out of a long legacy of papers
                        <SNIP>
> This images on the paper itself also compete quite will many thought and
in
> some cases they seemed superior.
> 
> So if your daily fiber is vital to you then check out using some higher
end
> paper Hahnem|hle outputted from your above average end inkjet, mines the
> 2200. The results are quite satisfying to the eyeballs as well as the
finger
> tips.
> 
> 
> 
> Mark Rabiner
> Photography
> Portland Oregon
> http://rabinergroup.com/