Category: dye transfer

Last Dyes

Posted on Posted in art biz, dye transfer, on photographers, the foraTagged , , , , , ,

The last dyes are like embers from the fading analog engine. The revivalists are rushing to ride the final fashion like Lauren Lauren’s Leica slung, long lean strappy dangling from her pampered bridal shoulder. Both, she and her camera, accessorizing his success.

Dye transfer prints will decorate many a wall. Some may hang for most of the year.

THE REAL : The show — meaning from the real world. The gallery world seeming more connected to factual effort.

Dye Transfer had an early glow, mystery of process, mystique of object value. The process was time and material consuming, making it in the fuller sense something for advertising, appealing as Veblen Good to the Haute Bourgeoisie.

“I was reading the price list of this lab in Chicago and it advertised ‘from the cheapest to the ultimate print’. The ultimate print was a dye-transfer…. The color saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn’t wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed … better than the previous one.” —William Eggleston in conversation with editor and writer Mark Holborn, 1991

:

CVI, Color Vision Imaging laboratory, Manhattan, 1981. Guy Stricherz (b. 1948) graduated from western Washington University in 1974. He went to New York city in 1977 to work for Frank Tartaro who was one of a dozen masterful printers. Even at that time the process was falling out of use. It had peaked by 1980. Irene Malli (b. 1964) graduated from Cooper Union; after graduation she worked as a printer before answering an ad for CVI in 1989. CVI was moved to Vashon Island from NYC in 2004. Some of their recent clients: Larry Burrows, Bruce Davidson, Thomas Demand, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Ernst Haas, Hiro, Evelyn Hofer, Graziela Iturbide, Zoe Leonard, Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, Christopher Williams.

Frank Tartaro was another user of the idea of “tone zone” masking.

The best memory is based upon your experience. Make your own.

THE IMAGINED: Unfortunately The Last Dyes show brings out the zombie experts of the hobby forums. Killers of a process they view from sideline. The show provides opportunity to talk as tho they had a privileged seat; bring out their old bar counter stories, a chance to repeat their prejudices of process. This is the use for the brag boards.

Question the tale of the salesman. I didn’t call him on his bullshit, so you have been left with his constant crap for a decade. Mea Culpa.

They don’t learn enough because they don’t ask, they aren’t curious. They don’t do enough because they lack courage. They fear failure more than they crave doing.

The false information is imprinted onto the naive minds. False tales aren’t questions, even though he is doubted. Why trust any part of his complex tale if the beginning direction is in error. Part of his ongoing commitment to his fantasy story of his skill is due to my being so bored with him at the St. Regis meeting, I fed him his own ignorance agreeing in order to escape. No one used Tanning Bleach in a commercial practice past 1952 — the mats weren’t sharp, nor durable enough for the uses of commercial printing. There was one use of tanning bleach: schools doing Pan Matrix film– this was rare, caused by group darkroom restrictions. AND the Army never made Matrix Film; they did buy it, while after Korean War, the Department of Defense sold the surplus materials. K&L (Len Z.) bought thousands of sheets which gave him a price advantage for several years.

The Army doesn’t make sandbags nor shoelaces. Not even CCA made their materials; they did have a need for large “trans” materials which Kodak refused to make. They couldn’t. They didn’t have the ready knowledge, so CCA tried two different coaters; NG was able to make the materials using a design provided them by Robert M. of Defender.

Lasting Lie Transfers: turning sales speak into history. The story is now being told by people who didn’t even participate until the story was over
eggleston show brings out stale fish stories; stolen valor from the photo fantists

  • “he was a machinist ” — about Eliot Porter; he wasn’t a machinist. His mode of making DTs didn’t require him to have “made his own” transfer equipment. He was a long time woodworker. He discovered the “black box” printing system. His self-made items are all wooden. No metal, no punch-pin system.
  • ” soft image– dye bleed” — the reason Condax was brought into Kodak was because of the improvement of Tanning Development over Bleach Tanning. Two immediate improvements: sharpness of transferred image, and improved color clarity with existing dyes.
  • ” don’t hold highlights well” — hmm, how about all those suds and softgoods ads? Or, Eggleston’s White Ceiling Fan.
dye diffusion effect

a piece of the elaborate custom equipment made by Eliot Porter for his dye transfer lab.

Google has found my post from 2013, titled: The Last Dye Transfers .. coincidence a long time coming

For those considering another possible use of matrix film– think it as a mask. I did. See this patent which I’d discovered around 1961: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2371746

Phonio

Posted on Posted in da net, dye transfer, morning wood

telling tales: to children about the evil rich chinese who fails because…

Have you heard the story about the rich Chinese who bought Technicolor, but couldn’t get it to work. If you haven’t heard it, good , it isn’t true. It’s based upon a prejudice told by a person Who is neither wealthy nor able.

A tale told often by the fool on the forum.

from an idler responding with waves and wishes; his comment, repeated many times has never been correct, and is never corrected. This lack of caring about accuracy is easy to pass off as knowledge among those asking questions about setting their camera ISO, or failing to know that pushing and pulling are terms from developing (movie lines introduced the terms). Even the long time keepers of those places seem to fail at understanding the exposure relationship differences between Negative and Slide processes. Furthering demonstrating the lack of experience based knowledge, consider that almost anyone with a drawer filled with negatives would realize that a sheet of 8×10 paper is covered by 4 (4x5s), or 1 roll of 120, or 135.

[The remaining Technicolor cameras, along with huge quantities of the remaining dyes, were allegedly sold to a Chinese entrepreneur, who thought there was a market for it in relation to the colorful big budget Bollywood films of India. But that would require rekindling an entire lost culture and industry of specialized craft at great expense, which proved unrealistic.]

Before providing a boast post, check– then, please proceed to boast of your skills.

[& if you don’t have a library, check online — avoid the forums]

Maybe this will help:

Technicolor:
The British line was shut down in 1978 and sold to Beijing Film and Video Lab which shipped the equipment to China. A great many films from China and Hong Kong were made in the Technicolor dye transfer process,[**] including Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990) and even one American film, Space Avenger (1989), directed by Richard W. Haines. The Beijing line was shut down in 1993.


The “revived” Technicolor Dye Transfer process had several patents:

eastmancolorDownload