Every Man His Own Fox Talbot - Paper Negatives

Do you have an abbey window handy? Do you have a top hat? Do you have a new Ilford Obscura pinhole camera kit? Well you too can be Henry Fox Talbot and be the envy of your friends at the camera club.

Okay, it is not quite the same as using glass lenses in one of HFT's famous 'mousetrap ' cameras and your finished product is not going to be made on salted paper but the procedure is similar and if you choose historical subjects you can give yourself a feeling for the past that digital work just does not provide. Sure, computer manipulation and plug-ins will deliver the calotype look, but actually going out there and doing a very long exposure provides the experience as well.

Just be prepared for foolish abuse if you opt to do it in Victorian clothing. Perth is not as sophisticated as it likes to think. Trust me on this...

Okay - why even think of this? Because paper negatives have a charm and an aesthetic all their own. And they are devilishly hard to achieve with conventional camera gear - even if you have 4 x 5 or larger film holders, a wooden field camera, and that top hat. Perth's bright sun can overpower most camera lenses looking in on standard photographic paper, even if the aperture is down to f:22. You need to be able to get extremely small apertures - f:248 for instance - to allow you sufficient time to open and close a shutter by manual means.

The shutter on the Ilford Obscura is a simple dropping flap. It has a closed position magnet as well as a open position one, so you need no fear inadvertently exposing the film or paper. When the camera is firmly screwed to a tripod, there should be no movement of the thing as you operate the flap. Of course, this may be very insignificant for an exposure lasting minutes, and when you opt to use the sheets of Ilford Multigrade IV paper as your recording emulsion, you will be spending minutes with the shutter open.

The exposure ISO of the paper is about .6. The calcu-later will let you translate this into a time, but realyy, give it a bit more time. If you have access to a sunny photospot nearb your darkroom you can profitably experiment to see just how long you need shoot to give a good negative.

Loading and developing paper negatives is a lot easier than doing film as you can do it under the light of a safelamp. Once you have the paper negative you can scan it in as a direct print and then press command/I on your image editing program and bring it up as a positive. From there you can calotype it to your heart's content.

The heading image is a paper neg of Perth from Heathcote taken some years ago with a conventinal lensed camera. I will try the same view with the Obscura and see what the results are like.

The Paper Shuffle - Part Five - The Oriental Connection

Are we allowed to use the word ' oriental ' any more? Probably not, if someone somewhere wants to make a fuss. But they are probably busy right now writing savage political memes for Facebook so I'll just go ahead and use it.

The object under scrutiny is a packet of twenty sample papers from the Awagami Factory in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku in Japan. About as oriental as you get...

The papers in this packet are referred to as washi - a style of paper making. It would appear that there are a number of trees and bushes, as well as rice, wheat, bamboo, or hemp, that can be called upon to contribute fibres to the process. This is reflected in the wild number of choices in this packet - choices that I am assuming can be duplicated when you order a specific paper in a specific size from the shop.

I noted at both Stirling Street and Murray Street that there are stocks in hand of those larger sizes.

Okay, some of these are things that might look like papers from western manufacturers - but some are  exotically eastern. You must decide whether your images are such as will be enhanced by the textures. The sample packet gives you a chance to see, but it is one chance per surface - there are 20 sheets there. Fortunately they are identified with an indexed sticker on the back of each sheet to let you know what you are handling and which side to print on.

The unfortunate part of this is that you may have to download some exotic profiles, and you may have to exercise your imagination whilst doing so. Presumably you cannot actually break your computer or printer while doing this...

So here is the list. Be patient. There are 20 sheets in there. I'll not comment on each one - just look at what their surface is doing and make up your own mind.

Here are a few clues to help you decode the names of the papers. 

Unryu: The IJNS UNRYU was a Japanese aircraft carrier that was torpedoed by USS REDFISH.  

Kozo: Tissue paper.

Inbe:  A clan in Japan. Like a clan in Scotland but fewer beards and skirts.

Mitsumata:  An unattended Japanese railway station.

Bizan:  A mountain near Tokushima.

Bamboo:  Self explanatory.

Bamgoo:  Like bamboo but stickier.

The Awagami Factory people point out on the back of the packet that these are papers made with natural materials and the result you get may be affected by this.

Do come to one of our stores and buy a sample packet of these papers and go home and try them. The thin ones will let the image through to the other side of the paper and the thick ones will impose their own patterns on your image, but somewhere in between there must be art. We can only benefit from your experiences, so bring the results back and show us.

The Paper Shuffle - Part Four - Rough Justice

 

Life is not all smooth and sleek in Dassel, Lower Saxony, and neither is it in the Hahnemühle factory. At least not in the division that makes the Matt Fine Art - Textured inkjet paper.

I don't know if the firm chops down chunkier trees or employs rougher workmen, but the results have a rugged charm all their own. Prepare to pick your way through a plowed field of paper. Mind your ankles.

Holy Moley, Batman...that is one rough surface. A definite lay and pattern to the Albrecht Dürer and enough texture to break any image into a pastel drawing effect.

Okay, if Dürer was a German artist who made etchings düring* the Renaissance, who was Torchon? And why did he draw on something that looks like the side of a barn? Turns out a torchon is a French tea-towel, which explains this surface perfectly. Is it too silly to suggest that you should print pictures of French food on this paper?

German Etching suggests monochrome images with sharp delineation and serious subjects. My experience with it was tempered by bad language and the realization that paper has a mind of its own - a mind that can be changed by heat and humidity. It can also be bent into shape to counteract these tendencies.

William Turner was a Romanticist landscape painter and I am wondering if the naming of this paper may unconsciously lead to photographers utilizing it for images that feature rain, steam, and speed. Will they be committing images to preset plug-ins with brush strokes. Will they turn the Gaussian blur up to 139? Of course we will...

Museum Etching is similar to German Etching but not quite as edgy. If you print a fair amount of your output on this paper - and it is available in quite large sheets - you can invite girls up to see your etchings. I did, and it just shows you what my social life is like. They came up and wanted to see etchings...

There is no disguising the cloth pattern evident in the Monet Canvas sheets - it would be an ideal choice for the sort of art image that one wraps around wooden frames for wall display. Hahnemühle themselves make kits to allow this sort of thing to be done. The kits are very good value and if you can put good colourful images on them you can sell them for a good price. Then you'll be in the Monet...

Not every image suits a rough surface, and not every printer will handle these papers. You need one that can be set so that the paper moves in and out of it on a straight, flat line. You may need to bend or steam the papers to get them to obey. But the artistic effect on the right image is magical...and when you get the trick operating right you can produce print after print the same way.

* I cannot be fürtive about it. I like the ümlaut key. It's fün to üse... 

The Paper Shuffle - Part Three - The Smooth German Connection

 

Hahnemühle are historic papermakers from Dassel in Lower Saxony. With a lot of small creeks ( " bachs " ) running through the place and forests nearby, it has proved to be a good location to make woodpulp and paper - they've apparently been doing it since 1584.

Currently there is a wide selection of papers that have been turned to the inkjet printing application from the company. Camera Electronic have had them for years and supplied some very special surfaces in large flat sheets. As well, there are rolls avaiable for the larger inkjet printers.

The Hahnemühle sample books have always been amazing things - exotic surfaces and extremely well-printed images that make you jealous. As well, they produuce a number of sampler packs to let people assess the things for themselves...but therein lies a problem. What are you supposed to be looking for and how will you know it when you see it?

Add to this the artistic question of what image suits which paper and you have a pretty wide field of speculation. I'll admit to buying a pack of Hahnemühle paper a few years ago based upon the name of it and a mistaken assessment of my own printing skills...and disappointing myself. But the story did have a happy ending - I eventually found which of my images would suit the surface and got the last 5 sheets of the packet to print perfectly.

Well, here's the smooth surfaces under the examining lens. Remember that these are all matt and will need the matt ink option - plus they will not quite get to the black of a gloss surface. But they are stylish and marvellously sturdy - a print on the 308 surface has a really impressive feel.

See the lay of the Rice Paper?

The 220gsm and less emphasised texture of this Photo Rag Book & Album means that you will be able to pack more pictures into the album and any text printeed with the image will be easy to read.

Bamboo. It is not necessarily a surface dedicated to Asian images...but the classic look of misty mountains and clouds would be well-suited to this broken surface. The disruption of it would probably suit rural images with natural shapes better than urban ones with man-made straight lines.

Ah, here we go for that technical image. The Photo Rag Ultra Smooth is 305 gsm but does not raise as many irregularities on the surface and would not disrupt fine detail.

The classic Hahnemühle fine art paper, Photo Rag 308 is often seen with the big roll printers. It supports some of the best landscape art in this state as well as commercial portraiture. See how it breaks the light just that little bit more than the Ultra Smooth?

Disregard what your screen or my camera shot might say - this is a noticeably whiter paper than the 308, as wll as picking up a little more weight; 310gsm.

I cannot say what this Daguerre Canvas looks like with an image because I have been told that my printer will not print canvas. I've been told a lot of things in the past few years but gone right ahead and done them anyway. I'll tel you what happens on a future post...

And that is the idea of these sample packs.They're A4 with two sheets of each surface in the parcel at a bargain price. You could do far worse than just getting a pack, going over your pictures for suitable art, and putting them through your printer. Hahnemühle have the profiles on-line, and they will be necessary, but that is easily done.

The Paper Shuffle - Part One - Lost In Space

If you are an old-school photographer like me you may occasionally be lost - lost on the back streets of  a new suburb at dusk before they put up the street signs, or lost for words at the latest horrible hipster trend...or just lost when it comes to which inkjet printing paper to use.

In the DOD ( Dear Old Days ) of fibre darkroom paper there was Kodak, Ilford, Fujifilm, and Agfa. There were 3-5 grades ranging from too soft to too hard, and there were imaginatively-named surfaces. Most of these were due to commercial imagination and you only ever printed on them once...but you could always fall back to matt, lustre, and gloss and find something for your film image. Single or double weight was a choice you made mostly on economic grounds.

 The advent of resin-coated paper was either wonderful or horrible, depending on whether you had water and time. The surface choices decreased.

Then the inkjet papers came along - and all of a sudden we had to figure out what gsm meant and what a profile was. Most of us still don't know what this is but we faithfully do what the paper makers say to do and generally things work out. I have adopted the sensible approach of letting the printer decide what it wants to do - the same approach I take to the relatives and the cat - and I am satisfied with the peace of mind.

But there's always that desire for a little more science - for a little more precision in the process. It has driven more people than I mad, so I am not willing to engage in the worst of the geekiness, but I have decided to look closely and see what it is that we are being given. I've no lab facilities but I do have a studio and I've decided to see what studio light can tell me about the printing papers that are on offer.

The methodology will be to to use grazing light to skim the papers while taking a macro picture of the surface. I do not expect to see much variation in the smoothness of a glossy paper, but I am curious to see what the pearl and lustre surfaces look like. The rougher and wilder papers are next after that - right down to the hand-laid ones.

I also want to see what relative amount of reflectance the papers send back, though the measurement may prove difficult. Not interested in percentages or numbers - interested in the look of the thing.

Finally, I want to see whether the gsm rating really does translate into a practical indicator for stiffness in the final product. I have long admired the stock that printers use for business cards  and other signage and have looked in vain for it in the inkjet papers. Home-made business cards, fake drivers licences, and eviction notices just do not have the dignity of the ones made on offset presses if they do not have the same crispness.

And no-one likes counterfeit money when it is soggy. I have had limited success with my line of  $ 7 and $ 8 Australian notes despite the colourful artwork and the choice of Australian Idol contestants as figureheads.

This column will publish results in a forthcoming series.

Uncle Dick

The Bargain Harman For the Prudent Printer

Normally when I receive goods into my studio for illustration I finish taking the pictures and then carefully repackage them for return to the shop. In the case of this box of Harman Crystaljet Lustre RC paper I might just pay them for it and keep it for the production room. It is that good.

I have used a number of Harman papers before - including a box of this type some time ago-and I am impressed with the way the surface takes the ink and with the fidelity that it has to my screen.

I know the colour management and printing experts scoff at this and say that I should be able to minutely adjust the computer, screen, printer, paper, and ink with scientific formulae and careful measurements so that I could get an award-winning panorama on toilet paper. I must put in the hard yards - when the going gets tough the tough get going - and a calibration in time saves nine. Rah rah. I just want to poke a piece of paper in the Epson R3000 and get a good print in one pass. The Harman will let me do this.

I am at a but of a loss to know quite why one paper is a smooth pearl and another a lustre. And another a semi-gloss. They all break up the light a little and they are all pretty forgiving of most of the types of image that you may put on them. If you can't afford to keep racks of paper choices, get one of these and make it do.

The good thing about the harman is the price - under $50 for 100 sheets of A4. If you addicted to test prints and go through a great many evocations before you finally accept her result, this means you get about 40% more shots than with comparable papers from other sources. If, like me, you are sneaky and do your test prints on an A4 by quartering it and passing it through the machine 4 times:

You can go even further. That's Dr. Sun as a statue in Singapore.

But you have to candidly admit that the process of colour printing with the inkjet is nowhere near as arbitrary or confusing as the CYM subtractive printing of the RA 4 chemical era. If you could manage that, you can print on an inkjet with one eye closed and the other reading a novel.

Harman Crystaljet in store right now.

Twenty Experiments For The Artist

Experimental art is something that breaks the boundaries. So does a Swiss post-bus going out of control down a mountain. Your appreciation of it is related to whether you are above watching it leave or below watching it arrive...

Not all of us are experimenters - some of us are timid, preferring the safe haven of established procedures to the wild seas of new experience. And that is about as much colourful imagery from me as you can stand.

We're selling paper. Ilford paper for inkjet printers. Heaven knows we sell a lot of it, because the stuff we sell is standard paper that works pretty much every time.

Oh, you can still fail - you can have horrible uncontrolled images in your computer and send them to your printer in a horrible uncontrolled way and get hideous results. But that is a matter of morality and screen calibration - we sell calibrators and there are people who can teach you morality. Ilford just provides good paper.

The types we sell most of are their Galerie Smooth Pearl and Smooth Gloss. Get within a coo-ee of the right colour management and use fresh ink and you'll never be disappointed in the results. That's a given.

But if you wish to try your eye, luck, and ink on a bit more artistic result, you may want to try different surfaces and consistencies in the paper - specifically you may want to print on matt paper with dedicated black ink. Some images become perfect in this way, but you might need to try it out in several ways before settling on the best choice for you. Here's where Ilford help - they sell a test-pack for fine-art printing and you can see in A4 size what your printing chain is capable of.

The pack has 20 sheets - 5 each of the following:

Galerie Cotton Artist Textured
Galerie Gold Fibre Gloss
Galerie Textured Cotton Rag
Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag

They are all 310 gsm and vary in resolution. Obviously the Gold Fibre Gloss has the finest resolution as it is intended to run with gloss ink  - the others are matt. You can download printing profiles for these easily from the instruction sheet packed with the paper.

5 sheets is enough to dabble a couple of times with tones and brightness and still leave enough paper to produce a series of prints that can be compared one with the other. Every printer eventually has a mental image of what they wish to achieve and this is a good way to show yourself the possibilities on your actual machine. It might not be fine art, but it can be helpful art.

Fine Art Paper - Pulp Friction Brought To Life

I realise that using the phrase fine art photography is a dangerous thing - it seems to be two adjectives chasing a noun. And in many cases unsuccessfully...But at least we can try.

If you hope to present digital images that will be hung you must make sure they deserve to be*. This means a great deal of careful work before the printer whirrs - photographing, editing, critiquing. The printer that you choose and the inks that it will use are prime factors as well...but the chief thing that has to be right is the paper.

It has to last. People who pay money for pictures want those pictures to stay flat, stay clean, and stay the way they were when the money changed hands. Thus you need to search out archival-quality paper. "Archival Quality" is also a fraught phrase but at least there are some scientific standards for it - laboratories have established criteria for the longevity of paper and ink and published them. Various manufacturers tell us that their products meet these standards.

Of course, performance over a passage of time is only tested by the passage of that time. There might be a sales warranty issue on the Great Pyramid of Cheops over the stone facing that has fallen away...but the builders are nowhere to be found.

But back to your prints. Your surface needs to be appropriate to the image presented. Some people want canvas - some paper. Some want aluminium - they can all be accommodated these days. The papers can be smooth matt, smooth gloss, smooth semi-gloss, or can have texture imparted in the manufacture. Some are extremely rough, but if the image can be of blocky form this may be just perfect.

On a technical point - the heavy papers can be very heavy and you'll need to see if your printer can deal with the increased thickness. They may also have considerable warp and droop and you'll need to make provision to eliminate or cope with this as well. Crude as it sounds, you might find yourself doing a bit of judicious paper bending with your fingers before you press the start button.

You'll be confronted with some real choices in the base colour of the paper. Various words are bantered about; wheat, buff, cream, ivory, etc. but the end result is off-white. See if your image is one that will be complemented by this sort of thing or whether you'll need a clear white. these are available too.

Come in an browse amongst the Ilford, Hahnemuhle, and Permajet products. Some can be got in sheet form and some in roll. Sample packs are here so that you can experiment before lashing out for a full box.

* Either they hang or you do...

Epsonnews - Money Is In The Pipeline

Two good bits of economic news from Epson - makers of fine inkjet printers, inks, and media.

1. The cash back offer to purchasers of Epson Stylus Pro SP-4900 printers has been extended. From the 15th of September to the 31st of October 2015 you can receive a $ 500 cash back from Epson on these fine devices. Of course you have to buy it from a dealer - like us - between these two dates, but all you have to do is contact them online after you have your printer and let them sight your serial number and invoice.

The 4900 is a very sophisticated A2 roll and sheet printer. It can produce all day, every day.

2. You can also participate in the Epson cash back festival by purchasing one of the new Epson SureColor SC-P600 inkjet printers between the 15th of September and the 15th of November 2015. In this case you do the same proof of purchase to Epson and receive $ 300 cash back.

The SC-600 would be ideal for the home printer and enthusiast. It can take roll paper, sheet paper, CD's, and produces prints up to A3+. Of course if you use the roll paper feed you can make looooong panoramas as well.

These printers are easy to use - I know because I use an R3000 at home  - and the results are delightful. And inkjet printers are perfect for one-off fast print jobs; you can be in and out of the computer room with a new A4 print in under two minutes with no cleanup, travel, or traffic time. Think about that next time you are stuck on the road at 4:30 in the afternoon...

Two Sides Of Two Papers - New Ilford A4 In Stock

Sometimes the humblest of products can be exciting.

Witness the two new boxes of paper from Ilford - we received supplies of double-sided matte paper this last week:

1. Ilford Galerie Prestige Fine Art Smooth.

A4 size and 220 gsm. Smooth bright white on both sides. boxes of 25 with the gold label. Appropriate profile in the Ilford website.

2. Ilford Galerie Prestige Fine Art Textured.

Again A4 size and 220gsm. This one has textured bright white on both sides. and again there is an appropriate profile for it.

Ilford media is the standard of he industry for many applications - this matte paper and Epson, Canon, or HP inks and printers wold make very good art book and presentation material.

Of course there is always the extra concentration one needs when making anything double-sided - you need to be careful with borders and spacing and remember to get your orientation right before you push the 'print' button. I have made a number of errors in all these things over the time and it does teach you eventually - at a price.

In any case, these are not punishingly expensive papers - you can experiment and delight yourself.

Matte or Gloss - A Cautionary Tale

All of or readers know the difference between matte and gloss when it comes to paper - one is shiny and one is not. Of course the manufacturers of paper make lots of grades of the stuff in between these two extremes, but that is another post.

The users of Epson inkjet printers also know that there are two black inks in their machines ;Photo Black and Matte Black. The 3800, 3880, 3000, SC-600, SC-800 and so on all have these choices - based upon the fact that you might be putting matte paper or gloss paper through the thing.

Some of them switch themselves from one choice to the other automatically when your computer sends the printing command - it contains a specification about what you are doing. Some need to be switched with a series of on-machine commands. The procedure is about the same in both cases. The printer shuts off one ink pipe and then flushes through the head with a little of the other sort. When it is ready to go it signals you or just whooshes on with the job. Very civilised.

But.

If, like me, you concentrate most of your printing on one sort of paper - in my case smooth pearl surface - you may use only one sort of black ink for months at a tme. While everything else gets stirred up all the time and flows nicely the unused ink in the other black cartridge settles and ages...and can clog up the heads when you try to switch to it.

Look at the cartridge that you don't use - or at least keep a record of when it went into the printer and what the expiry date was on it. If it is likely to have clagged up in the interim, pluck it out and plug in a fresh one. The price you pay for a new cartridge is a bargain compared to a clogged head and hours spent running cleaning programs.

Geez, Louise....Where's My Wallet? Paper Sale!

Start the car! Start the car!

Camera Electronic have boxes of Harman professional inkjet paper on special.

The special is for 100-sheet boxes of Harman Crystaljet Luster RC and it is a lovely surface. Think sort of a smooth pearl effect with 260 gsm weight. Clean white.

The special is for A4 size only - the 100-sheet box will cost you:


                                                         $ 49.95

This special is one time - when they go, they gone...start the car and come down here and score big!

For 50¢ a sheet you can afford to print EVERYTHING...


                                                       

Hello, Old Friends - Ilford Paper

Well, this is nice. Ilford Multigrade darkroom paper in the economy pack.

Haven't seen the big 250 sheet box for some time - it is good to find that it is still with us. Like the Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl and Smooth Gloss inkjet papers, this darkroom paper is sort of the standard of the industry - everybody can use it and everybody gets consistent results.

These boxes are  the 5" x 7" size - perfect for portraits and albums - and at 38¢ per sheet should make all our analog darkroom workers happy. Note we also have new boxes of Ilford Multigrade filters if your old set has faded.