The idea of combining the artistic controls of digital imaging with the inherent beauty of a historical process like platinum palladium has been both exciting and technically daunting. The best I have seen are prints made by the Salto Atelier in Belgium from five negatives up to one meter wide made on an image setter with a resolution of upwards of 10,000 dpi. The cost of equipment like that, or having Salto make the negatives for me, is prohibitively expensive, but I have been using their prints as a standard to work toward.
The practice of using inkjet printers to output the negatives has been around for some time (Dan Burkholder wrote the book more than ten years ago) but to me the quality has always left something to be desired. It is only in the last few years, with the progression in the quantity of inks and media, that inkjet negatives can, while they still don’t stand up to negatives made in camera, yield truly exquisite prints.
Hey Richard,
Excellent series! Hope to see the originals some time.
So what format did these originate? Were they 2 1/4 negs that were scanned and enlarged into digital negs that could be contacted in platinum?
Cheers,
Ken Choat