filmfriday. Imagining beauty. Is it in what you do, how you do it… is it out there. Can you pass the test of expectation of others. Can they pass your test.

Beauty is their approach. It is a flower. It is Flower. Delicate, transparent, easily broken, fluid, feminine, even in the Hasselblad hands of a man. Judgement is easy. Is it like the original. Likeness is the metric of value, craft skill is reprographic fidelity.

Dye transfer, as a printing process, is capable of working both ends of the density curve: highlights and shadows. Most processes can work the highlight end; that is given by the paper. White. Being able to differentiate small variation in light tones is what a simple, early stage, dye printer fails to achieve… glassware was the hallmark of the better printer. Glass and foam paid well.

Dye prints shadows very easily. Saturation comes as first steps. This the space that most all dye transfer printers worked within. The casual printer always showed their deep, dark prints.

[see: dye transfer isn’t photography ] — pink24

My time in the dye transfer cage provided me contact with many, each having their context. Most clients of dye labs have similar goals, which were quite small. Narrow even. Even though the work of hand-labs couldn’t be automated, it had to be repeatable, at times seemingly repetitious.

I made my first prints around 1958. They were from color negatives — I used Kodak Pan Matrix Film. Eventually, about a year later, I was making direct separations; hand retouching them, and making prints from those using Matrix film ( the ortho stuff). I would have seen work by commercial photographers. The texts I used were from Kodak, DuPont, Curtis … the manufacturer literature. My enlightenment came from Outerbridge’s book, in which he discussed masking by retouching.

Some few years later, I contacted Kodak with questions. I was still in High School. but I had a clients who didn’t know I was using a bank account opened by my mother.

… and so it goes.