Prints

580/Q said:
I have a 7890 and a 3880 - they use the same ink set. Outstanding printers. My local (three-hour drive) Costco has closed their photo dept.

The price of ink has skyrocketed in Canada and I'm looking at alternatives. I have enough ink left for a few more large prints, but I'm not sure what my options will be after that. The perverse in me thinks (again) of Daido Moriyama and one of his shows where he used an on-site photocopier to make ad-hoc books for patrons. I've used a garden variety B&W laser printer to make mock-ups of images.

Predictably, and largely because of the content, some of them survive in my office.

But most of my work is in colour -- hence the Epsons. (Pencils in time to research alternative ink sets.)
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I use Jon Cone's inks from InkJet Mall. High quality and a huge savings.

https://shop.inkjetmall.com/
 
I have prints of family on my walls. All taken on HP5+ and developed and scanned at home, then printed using a Canon printer and the best paper I can afford. If a photo is important, it gets printed.
 
Rob-F said:
I got a little disappointed in digital printing when I had a Canon color printer. I made a few good prints with it, maybe 30 or 40, until a day came when when I saw a message saying that the waste ink tank was full, and I should consult with my repair agency. I asked at the dealer where I bought it, and was advised to throw the damn thing away and buy another one. I don't like disposable equipment; I think gear should be maintainable. I threw it in the recycle bin and never bought another printer. I asked around, here and at Photo.net, about the possibility of better luck with an Epson printer. I was told they are rather a headache, as well. It's been some years now. I just make wet prints in the darkroom. But I do have an M9, an M9M, and a D700, and I might like to start doing digital printing again, if I knew of a printer worth owning.
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I have an Epson XP 15000 wide format (13x19) printer that has given me no problems thus far about a year into owning it. Perhaps 50 prints so far, 11x14 for the most. Prior to that I have had both Canon and Epson printers that used pigment ink and gave me fits. I don't know if that is part of the package with pigment ink or what but this dye base printer and the old HP dye base printer I started this journey on were bullet proof.
 
ptpdprinter said:
I also remember that I read or heard someone say that your ability as a photographer would be judged by your least successful photograph, so you want to limit what you let others see to your very best work. As you might imagine, I am not a big fan of those joining Flickr and doing memory card dumps. If you show everything you ever shot, the good images will look like what Minor White (and no doubt others) referred to as "happy accidents". Who wants to be compared to a monkey with a typewriter?
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Yes! Yes! It has happened to me -- I am a very slow learner in this. Maybe I shoot 250 frames of some person at a situation. I have to submit perhaps 20 ordered. Always when I submit a file that I think is... "acceptable but so-so" they always are picking that same one to lead layout or only one to publish! Always! Husband is laughing because it happened last to him. We shake ours heads because it is us knowing that it will happen before we do it.

Ciao,

Mme. O
 
Another long time printer here. Started using the school darkroom in the late fifties and discovered the magic. By the late sixties was wet printing 35mm thru 4"x5" negatives using an Omega D6 enlarger. My prints were usually 8x10" or 16x20" size with the larger ones often mounted and submitted to various exhibitions. All wet printing was done using Agfa materials, both B&W and colour. B&W was done using normal trays, but I used a curved tray called a canoe for colour. You floated these on a controlled temperature water bath and rocked them back and forth with a small amount of chemical used one shot and discarded. Agfa was very generous with the amount of silver they used and had the best blacks, their colour paper could be viewed wet and didn't need drying to see if colour balance was correct. A big plus doing test strips.

All my prints were on graded paper so as a result I only printed the easy negatives. Ones that might only might need some dodging or a grade change, and didn't have too many spots. I must have known what I was doing. NAPA (National Association of Photographic Art) awarded me a couple of gold medals for prints I sent to shows. Also received the Carveth award, think they were the big Leica importer/dealer back in the day. I soon gave up sending prints to photo salons and exhibitions as they often came back in poor shape with damaged corners and covered in scratches and finger prints. I guess that's the advantage of screens over prints, and with 4K now and 8K down the road who knows the directions things will take. Am presently using a fast i9 machine with a 4K Benq monitor that does full Adobe or darn close. Mighty nice for viewing images but I'm going to have a foot firmly planted on each side of the fence. A 27" 4K monitor and framed large prints on the walls.

All my printing is done digital fashion these days. My negative archives are finally getting digitized with a view to printing some. Purchased an Epson 3880 a few years back and have been feeding it Epson ink and paper. The results are impressive and equal what I was able to obtain in the darkroom. Best of all the difficult to print negatives now become much easier to deal with and you only have to do spotting once. Digital camera files get archived and few make it through my filters to print stage, many more are screen fodder.

Am wondering the best path to proceed, it's getting hard to get Epson ink here in Canada and the price keeps climbing. Perhaps a good time to turn 3880 into a B&W only printer like has been mentioned. Must try to navigate inkjet mall and figure out all that needed to do the switch. I've kept all my old ink cartridges to save the chips, as had heard it was the thing to do.

In the meantime I've got an Epson P900 still in the box that needs unpacking and testing to see what it's capable of. Also want to explore the possibility of printing on double side paper to make books. There are papers made for this by Red-river and I'd like to try it for a project.

Glenn
 
The print is the ultimate goal, at least for my favorite photos. Limited time and other logistical restraints prevent me from printing at a higher rate, but it also forces stricter editing, which offers its own instructive advantages.

I started darkroom printing a few years ago, and while the process itself can be tedious (namely setting up and breaking down---live in small apartment) or frustrating (especially as a novice), the gratification and aesthetic reward, for me, more than compensate for any associated hassles.

As a spectator of other’s work, I prefer viewing an original darkroom or inkjet print or well printed book over a computer monitor. And the importance of books is a whole other topic.

To be clear, most of my photos will remain in the digital domain, so my personal preference isn’t fully steeped in any type of do or die dogma. After all, I still digitize my negatives to present on the web. Plus, the digital process also creates a rough ‘blueprint’ of sorts on how I want the wet print to appear. For me, when viewing a black & white photograph, a monitor radiates the photo out, which can certainly have its dramatically vibrant advantage while a print draws me in with its subtle tonal gradations and natural illumination. But again, this is just me.
 
This past weekend I just made my first ink-jet Baryta prints and am hooked.
 
I am sad, frustrated, angry and disillusioned. My Epson P700, less than 2 years old and still on the first full set of inks, is now refusing to load papers. When I get the motivation I'll try messing with it but I'm fed up with dealing with the thing. My previous Epson gave me years of service and superb image quality but eventually developed the same problem. I'm in no mood to spend this much money again for a printer plus almost $400 for a full set of inks only to have it become landfill.

I've set up a Flickr account to share photos. Unless the printer heals itself, I'm outta the printing game.
 
Bill, I'm old-fashioned too. Two enlargers and an overhead contact printing light. I consider prints to be a huge part of the process.
 
This subject has come up a few times over the years and during one of these conversations Bill make a very succinct statement.

"Nobody has ever hung a negative on a wall in a gallery or museum."

This really gets to the heart of the matter.

Taking the picture is only half the journey. A photo really only exists once it has been printed and exists in the physical world, manipulated to the final vision of the photographer.

Ansel Adams said that the negative is the score and the print the performance. That really sums it up perfectly.

Mozart wrote The Magic Flute, but until it is performed and brought to life, it’s merely ink on paper.

I haven’t printed in about 20 years, mainly because I didn't have the space for a darkroom, but also because shooting and life got in the way. And I am not a master darkroom printer. In addition the cost of sending out a few hundred negatives to be scanned on a professional scanner was prohibitive. So, it never got done.

But I’ve always kept an eye on the advances in inkjet printing and other technologies.

About two years ago I came across a Hasselblad X5 scanner for sale at a very attractive price. I quickly did the math, calculating the cost of 300 scans at a service bureau vs the purchase. A week later the scanner was sitting on my desk and I’ll be driving my current car for another year.

I spent weeks scanning negatives and invested in a Piezography Pro black and white inkjet printing system for my Epson P800.

Printing turned out to be something of a magical experience. Not quite as magical as the first time I saw a print appear in a pan of developer, but still; it was pretty thrilling to finally see these images tacked to a wall, as the work prints accumulated.

For economic reasons I made the work prints on 8.5x11 paper, but the final images will be printed larger.

It took about 4 months of non-stop work to get through roughly 100 prints, but it was a sight to behold.

I had settled on a selenium toned neutral ink set and printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta Paper. The quality of the the prints that Piezo Pro can achieve on this paper are pretty astonishing and have the look of a very well executed gelatin silver print. It is amazing how far this technology has advanced over the years and what your average consumer can now purchase for a reasonable price.

The only catch was that my Epson 800P printer was producing ‘pizza wheel’ marks on the prints, as the paper swelled up from soaking up the ink. So, I needed a new printer with a pneumatic transport system and I preemptively spent my tax return on an Epson P6000 printer. Once again I made the calculation of sending out for prints and purchasing the printer. I pulled the trigger on Black Friday and a week later a friend and me were manhandling a 250lbs printer up the staircase into my apartment…

I’m now making the final push to print the full-size finals and it’s pretty thrilling. It’s a little strange to see these images that so far only lived on my screen hanging on the wall. But it’s really exciting.

On a side note one interesting possibility of the Piezo Pro system is the ability to generate a digital negative on a transparency for making things like platinum contact prints. That certainly is something I would like to explore down the road...


One positive side effect of printing is that in some ways it has cured my paranoia of shooting digital. A RAW file only exists as a bunch of electrons on a hard drive. If the hard drive goes it takes the image with it forever. Even with backups it’s a little unnerving and in my day job I have seen ungodly amounts of data get lost. So, I know it happens- all the time. But having a physical print in hand really goes a long way to soothing that fear.

Anyhow, I’m a big believer in prints and really recommend it to anyone who is serious about their photographic endeavors.


You can see the results here

www.thelatentimage.net
 
Harry Lime said:
"Snip" This subject has come up a few times over the years and during one of these conversations Bill make a very succinct statement.
"Nobody has ever hung a negative on a wall in a gallery or museum."
This really gets to the heart of the matter.
You can see the results here
www.thelatentimage.net
"snip"
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Harry Lime, a great story! Thank you for sharing your personnel journey with us. Such an enjoyable read for me.

All the best,
Mike
 
jsrockit said:
I like photobooks as an art form and those need to be printed. I like all of the design choices that go into photobooks and holding a body of work in my hands.
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Yes, this makes the most sense to me.

Although I have photos on disk, CD’s, and on removable USB sticks, I know those are the most temporary. So, for me, the print is everything. It is tangible. No electronics, no software application. Just look at the print. I have family photos that are over 120 years old.

Although I am doing a lot of printing, it is the organization of those prints that makes them more appealing. I haven’t used Photobooks yet - but that is my plan.

Additionally and equally important, I always provide some note to go with the photo - date, place, person, or description.
 
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