[HN Gopher] Platinum Photography
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Platinum Photography
Author : noahbrier
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-06-21 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| timw4mail wrote:
| As if silver wasn't expensive enough...
| Finnucane wrote:
| It is of course still possible to do--you can get the chemicals,
| the cameras, the paper, etc. There are people still doing it. The
| number is not very large. It's nontrivial expense and labor. The
| prints are indeed very nice.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Bostick and Sullivan offers pt/pd printing kits for sale.
| https://www.bostick-sullivan.com/product-category/alternativ...
| cratermoon wrote:
| I learned about platinum/palladium processes when I studied them
| in college. The prints are amazing physical creations.
| 23B1 wrote:
| WITI is a really cool newsletter BTW. I use this as an
| alternative to reddit/kottke/twitter in terms of
| fresh/interesting content, just because I'm sick and tired of all
| the nonsense on the other platforms.
| leach wrote:
| I didn't even know this was a thing but would love to try this
| process out.
|
| I was lucky enough to learn film development in high school,
| though now a days I don't have access to a darkroom.
|
| Which is unfortunate because many of my family members are
| photographers and used to have darkrooms in their homes.
| cesaref wrote:
| You don't need a darkroom for film development. A changing bag
| and some light proof tanks allow for this. To develop 5 _4 or
| larger large format film (for contact printing) you need light
| proof trays, or you can use a 5_ 4 adapter for a jobo tank.
|
| I guess you then have to have some registration holes in the
| paper + film to align them correctly if you want to check paper
| exposure during development, but my understanding is that the
| process is slow enough that you again aren't in a darkroom, you
| are exposing the paper with sunlight, and then fixing can be in
| a tray.
| jmwilson wrote:
| There are metal replacement toners that replace the silver in a
| print with either gold or platinum. This way the print can be
| made normally with an enlarger and silver chemistry to overcome
| the contact printing limitation. Toning improves the longevity of
| the print and provides many of the same tonal effects, depending
| on how long the print sits in the bath. Unfortunately, the
| chemicals involved are quite toxic. I remember one of the
| instructors at the Rayko darkroom in San Francisco running a
| "toning day" and it was very busy with a number of people coming
| in to tone their work and share the considerable material and
| hazmat fees for the chemicals.
|
| "unlike silver gelatin prints that hold the chemicals in a layer
| on top of the paper, platinum photography uses chemicals that are
| soaked into the paper, so the image lies embedded in its fibers."
|
| Fiber paper for silver prints is also a thing, and easily
| available from commercial sources. It requires more extensive
| washing compared to RC (resin coated) paper, and it tends to curl
| and warp after wetting. To get prints flat after drying, you need
| a big heated press that looks like a giant panini maker.
| cesaref wrote:
| I think selinium toning is like this, and that's definitely in
| the dubious stuff you really don't want to get on your skin
| category. The prints do look gorgeous after selinium toning
| though!
|
| And I agree, fibre paper is awesome but the drying and mounting
| process tends to be onerous compared to resin coated paper, so
| I rarely do it. Saying that, I do happen to have a 16*20
| capable heated paper press, but compared to fibre, there really
| is no contest for convenience!
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| >Rayko
|
| I got into film photography too late to ever visit Rayko. How I
| wish it had survived, somehow. Having a whole darkroom for rent
| in town would be incredible.
| 100k wrote:
| San Francisco has the Harvey Milk Photo Center, which has a
| huge dark room and film processing facilities. It's pretty
| awesome. I've taken several classes there.
| https://www.harveymilkphotocenter.org/
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Wow, thank you! Sounds like I can even learn how to _use_
| the darkroom there. Boy, I love that we have stuff like
| this here. Shoutout to Oscar's in SOMA for doing a great
| job developing my stuff for me, fwiw.
| 100k wrote:
| Absolutely. There are regular darkroom classes you can
| sign up for. It's kind of hard to get a spot because the
| classes are small but my teacher said people also have
| learned how on YouTube and then come in to practice.
| iNerdier wrote:
| Fibre prints are however still a layer on the surface, usually
| over the top of a baryta (barium sulphite) layer that acts as a
| white base. Platinum-Palladium prints really are soaked into
| the fibre of your paper.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| Any vendors of toner replacement chem you could pass along?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Photographers' Formulary is your place
| <https://stores.photoformulary.com/>
| cesaref wrote:
| I've used kodak selenium toner, this stuff: https://www.ag-
| photolab.co.uk/product/kodak-rapid-selenium-t...
|
| I've also used tetenal for sepia style prints, their sulphide
| toner. Not a metal toner, but produces interesting and long
| lasting prints, this stuff:
| https://tetenal.com/en/homepage/consumer-shop/black-white-
| ch...
|
| Tetenal make great C41 and E6 chemistry too if this is your
| thing.
| jmwilson wrote:
| Kodak & Ilford sell regular selenium toners, and
| https://stores.photoformulary.com/toners/ for more exotic
| stuff
| cratermoon wrote:
| > many of the same tonal effects,
|
| The toners don't replace the silver so much as alter or
| supplement it. I used selenium back in the 80s and the (fiber
| paper) prints so treated have held up almost perfectly. The
| tonal difference it very subtle. Mounting them on archival
| board or storing them in neutral buffered paper boxes is
| essential for maximum longevity.
| musictubes wrote:
| I have a book that is only about photographic toners. I think
| that's where I read that many vintage "platinum" prints are
| actually platinum toned Kallitypes. Still platinum on the paper
| in the end.
| mattlocketest wrote:
| [dead]
| davidjade wrote:
| Here's a resource for anyone that really wants to dive into this.
| Dick Arentz is a modern day master of the technique. His book is
| pretty much the definitive resource.
|
| https://www.dickarentz.com/
| shrubble wrote:
| I found out about carbon prints, still have it as a bucket list
| item to make one, though they are quite labor intensive.
| musictubes wrote:
| Carbon prints are both more stable and have a wider possible
| tonal range than platinum prints do. I'm not sure where he got
| the idea that platinum prints have a wide tonal range from. While
| they have exquisite highlight separation, they tend to have a
| rather compressed, flat tonal range. The dimensionality he talks
| about due to the emulsion sinking into the paper fibers is also a
| reason for the compressed tonal range.
|
| Very few people use pure platinum salts. Most prefer a mix of
| platinum and palladium to get better darker tones. It is also
| more likely that vintage "platinum" prints are probably platinum
| toned Kallitypes.
|
| All of the positive things he attributes to platinum prints are
| probably better applied to carbon prints. I think carbon is the
| ultimate printing medium for monotone photographs. Maximum
| control of tonal range, detail, and the best longevity.
| vGPU wrote:
| >You can't take a small negative and project it onto the paper,
| as you do with an enlarger for silver gelatin prints.
|
| Pretty much sums up the point. Using 8x10 or whatever size
| negatives when film rolls were coming about is a non-starter for
| the general public.
|
| The cost seems very high as the other commenter has mentioned
| also. From a quick search purchasing a kit will give you a
| printing cost of ~$15/photo. This immediately relegates it to the
| realm of hobbyists with money. Canvas prints of that size may be
| a bit cheaper for someone seeking something that's a bit more
| special than a regular photo.
| balou23 wrote:
| I did not really understand this point.
|
| >The first reason is linked to one of the drawbacks of platinum
| photography. Although the resulting images are far superior,
| platinum does not react as quickly to light as silver. This
| means that you can only make an image using the contact
| printing technique
|
| Wouldn't that just mean you have to wait longer?
| seszett wrote:
| > Wouldn't that just mean you have to wait longer?
|
| You would have to wait _much_ longer with a standard
| enlarger, probably several _days_ and that 's without taking
| into account reciprocity failure. In practice, it just
| wouldn't work.
|
| I haven't tried platinotype myself since platinium and
| paladium are so expensive, but I do print a lot of cyanotype
| which has a similarly low sensitivity and I built a UV
| enlarger for that, which works quite well with exposure times
| on the order of a few minutes for enlarging 35mm onto A5
| paper.
|
| It requires a 40W 365nm UV LED source though, cooling for the
| negative in order not to burn it, and a few other tricks to
| get it to work well.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| > Wouldn't that just mean you have to wait longer?
|
| In theory, yes. The actual values may help. I've heard
| exposure times cited around eight minutes. That's for contact
| printing using the sun as a source. I don't know off-hand how
| much light an enlarger will deposit on paper, but it is a few
| orders of magnitude less than the sun. For the sake of
| estimating, let's say 3 orders of magnitude.
|
| This gives an exposure time of 5 days. Note that you'd want
| to make a test strip or two--someone who knows what they're
| doing might want two test strips to dial in the exposure
| settings, at which point it takes you 15 days to make the
| first print (but then only 5 days for each additional print
| from the same negative).
| balou23 wrote:
| Thanks, that explains it.
|
| I guess good thing you can "cheat" nowadays with digital
| enlarging (in the case where you "just" want to have a long
| lasting picture. I have pictures of my great great
| grandparents, I don't trust that any of my digital pictures
| will last 4 generations)
| masfuerte wrote:
| You can buy 50,000 lumen lightbulbs nowadays which, from 1
| metre away, are in the same ballpark as the sun.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| Do they produce enough UV to expose platinotype? Most of
| the modern lights you see are LEDs that produce mostly
| visible light.
|
| You can get UV bulbs, but at this point in our scenario
| we're modifying enlargers, and the enlarging lens may
| focus differently in the UV region from the visible
| region (something you'd have to check and compensate
| for). Normally you'd focus an enlarger visually, perhaps
| with a grain focuser--maybe at this point you'd be
| focusing manually with the grain focuser in the visible
| region and then making some calculated adjustment for UV.
| Or you'd be hunting down a lens which was designed to
| have the same focal length into the relevant part of the
| UV spectrum.
| davidjade wrote:
| This is exactly it. Platinum printing requires UV. All of
| the platinum printing darkroom setups I have seen all had
| large and powerful UV sources for contact printing.
| seszett wrote:
| > _Normally you'd focus an enlarger visually, perhaps
| with a grain focuser--maybe at this point you'd be
| focusing manually with the grain focuser in the visible
| region and then making some calculated adjustment for UV_
|
| Yes, I have some experience with this (see my other reply
| in this thread) and it's a real problem but there is an
| easy fix.
|
| Instead of using a grain-focuser (which would also be
| dangerous for the eyes anyway, and good quality UV lights
| don't leak much into the visible) you use plain white
| paper, cheap paper that is treated with optical
| brighteners.
|
| These brighteners glow in the UV to make the paper look
| whiter, which means that under your UV enlarger, they
| turn the projected UV into a visible image. You can then
| focus using a regular looking glass to look at the paper.
| And UV-blocking sunglasses (you can easily test if they
| actually block UV: the paper will not glow at all if UV-
| blocking glasses are in the way).
|
| Some lenses are corrected for UV-Vis focus shift, but
| they are generally extremely expensive.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| How hot are they? You don't want to scorch anything.
| iNerdier wrote:
| It depends what you mean by longer. One thing not mentioned
| is that platinum prints expose under ultra violet light,
| light which doesn't transmit as well through glass to begin
| with, coupled with several orders of magnitude less
| sensitivity than silver emulsions.
|
| Rather than a few seconds you'd be waiting several days for a
| comparable exposure.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| Contact printing means you have to press the negative against
| the paper
| nyrikki wrote:
| Negatives are smaller than you typically want the final
| images to be, with contact printing you positive images would
| be the same size as the negative.
|
| Printing for end user consumption almost always involved
| enlargement.
|
| The cost, inconvenience, and increased light of large format
| cameras with silver based films made them unpopular too
| despite the reduction in quality.
|
| Similar to the quality vs convenience tradeoff that results
| in people using cell phones as cameras.
| paulmd wrote:
| You can laser print an image (any image!) onto a projector
| transparency (overhead sheet) and do a contact print that way.
| Then you take it out into the sun and use that to expose the
| paper. Contact prints require very little resolution so a laser
| print (or an inkjet print) is generally fine despite not being
| that high a PPI.
|
| The "authentic" way would be to create an internegative with an
| enlarger. You might use reversal-processed B+W film for example
| (creating a B+W positive), or create an interpositive and then
| use that to create an internegative (more steps obviously).
| Either way it's true that the analog process is a bit of a
| pain, but modern "hybrid" workflows completely remove this.
|
| It's not just platinum prints that have this problem btw.
| Cyanotype paper is also extremely slow, contact prints are
| almost always the strategy there too. Given how slow it is, and
| the particular range of UV-sensitivity it needs, it's difficult
| to do indoors actually, but fortunately the universe has seen
| fit to bless us with a large, powerful UV source overhead for
| around 12 hours per day.
|
| Same for azo paper and some of the other silver papers even...
| the kodak "postcard cameras" using 122 rollfilm (not 120!) were
| usually contact-printed and the simplest answer was to do it
| outdoors. Slow paper is actually easier if you are working
| outdoors, because it gives a longer working time and exact
| light levels or split-second timing doesn't matter.
|
| Chemistry was simply much slower in the early days, a "fast
| film" in the early days was like ISO 8 iirc, and paper was even
| slower, you had "fractional ISO" in many cases. And a "fast
| lens" was a rapid rectilinear at f/8. Today we just take it for
| granted that an exposure is a fraction of a second but that was
| not at all a common thing in the early days of photography.
|
| The idea of modern cameras with backlit CMOS sensors shooting
| ISO 256,000 with a f/1.2 lens would have vaporized a medieval
| peasant instantly. /s
|
| And the idea of internegatives/interpositives has pretty much
| faded over time too. But this used to be a much more normal
| part of darkroom work. When you hear the term "unsharp mask"
| used... that actually comes from the times when it would be a
| literal mask, an interpositive that you enlarged together with
| the negative to control edge sharpness.
|
| But yes you are right that analog photography is a rich
| person's hobby these days... the prices are significantly
| higher than even when I was doing it 10-15 years ago (which was
| already into the digital era). Almost all of these processes
| run on silver or platinum or other organometallic chemistry
| (with a few exceptions like cyanotypes) and the "metallic" part
| of that chemistry has climbed hugely in price, on top of sales
| volumes collapsing. The precious metal prices are why photo
| stores/etc will often take exhausted fixer for free... there is
| a commercially significant amount of silver in that bottle, and
| it all came out of your film/paper!
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It's possible to print large negatives from digital files. The
| results are stunning if you manage to get the curve right.
|
| I've done a few times, lots of trial and error and I never
| could get a curve that worked perfectly on multiple setups or
| even on multiple shots with the same setup. A bit of tweaking
| is required for every shot, in my experience.
|
| It's just that the whole thing is slow, expensive and error
| prone in every step of the way. It's a labor of love and it
| shows.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > It's possible to print large negatives from digital files.
|
| You can actually do it on your home laser printer, onto
| transparent sheets.
|
| You can then go even easier and make salt prints (also uses
| silver) and the sun. They come out very interesting.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| This sounds like a great use for the laser transparencies I
| bought at Goodwill having no particular use in mind. Thanks
| for the idea!
| frostburg wrote:
| If you're going to buy platinum / palladium reagents,
| which aren't cheap, I suggest printing the digital
| negative on Mitsubishi Pictorico OHP. Check which of the
| inks in your printing system is more opaque to UV to
| improve dynamic range.
|
| Use the media that your already have to dial in your pre-
| processing to some extent.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It depends on the resolution and shades of gray your home
| printer can output. It will work, of course, but you may be
| disappointed with the harshness.
|
| Last time I printed on an Epson 9600 @1200dpi. It looked
| awesome.
|
| Salt prints are great fun and have a distinct look. Very
| different from palladium and platinum.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| My understanding is digital c-types use LASERs to expose the
| paper.
|
| Could you in a similar way use a UVASER for this process?
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