Category: the fora

all that stuff people say online

the Dye Guy

Posted on Posted in da net, dye transfer, minimum daily requirement, the fora

If you are of the internet age, of those who know more about dye transfer as a mystic process from a distant age. As a process steeped in, and dripping with the badge of chemical craft — meticulous step by step make no error darkroom work, then you probably know few names of its thousands of practitioners.

You know those who have been proclaimed by the forums as keepers of the skill. They aren’t the folks I knew. Of course I knew of Eliot Porter, but then I also knew of his assistants as well as some of the printers who worked at the labs who printed for him.

The photographer most people know is William Eggleston. A man of many printers.

The person most of you from the pop-photo, camera store, workshop trained photographers have heard of is Ctein. He isn’t the person I think of as the main dye guy. To me, he is a tech writer who was given work by Frank McLaughlin of Kodak.

I have mixed feelings about this post. Ctein can’t do any harm — neither can he do any good — not for you, not if you are trying to learn about making prints. The information of doing that exists in better, more usable form in several books and places. The process as it is done in this century is fading again. The last orthomatrix film coating was in 2018. That was done by a coater that no longer has the equipment used for that type coating.

What bothers me is the sense of privilege along with the power given to someone who spent so much time staking claim to a skill so widely held — an ability to make prints many times more often, to even higher demands with a seemingly endless array of problems. A commercial lab doesn’t often reject possible clients. Our success was based upon solving a clients problem, not by setting out the reason we wouldn’t take their job. “we’d have to change a printer”

limitations … perhaps after years doing dyes didn’t provide enough profit to afford two printers in his second stage..

he doesn’t have to tell his story; others will repeat it. By association they gain favor.

“I know great people, must mean I’m a great person.”

So, what’s my problem. None. I understand all of this — I even understand that you will not change your viewpoint. You shouldn’t.

Too bad you never met the real dye guys. Too bad you never became one.

Cutoff Filter

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, coursenotes, labnotes, the fora

cutting off light. cutting off learning. cutting off experience.

Photography is an experimental studio art — with experiment meaning experience. Art is philosophy — as photographers gain experience they make it and themselves meaningful. We walk around becoming more and more an artist. Maybe our photography, that physical stuff, never catches up to us. Most photographers stop themselves rather than being stopped. I find them, the stalled ones, gather together saying they want to help others. They offer advice which, on face, seems sound, it is often repeated. It is rarely based upon direct experience. It is often wrong — in application and theory.

In the color darkroom — the age of enlargers. When enlargers were called that. No need to give them a new coat calling them “optical” — they were enlargers, the key to the photo-lab, the darkroom was built to house them. They used hot-lights — light bulbs.

Enlarger Lamps

ESJ 3350K … PH140 3000K — two common lamps with their respective color temperature. These are both small bulbs used in small, but common darkroom enlargers. A chart of color temperature may help in understanding why we need IR cutoffs in a hot enlarger.

Chopping the IR off the enlarger light path means the emulsion will have less spurious response to the image being projected (enlarged). Infrared isn’t “heat” — there is a thermodynamic element to it, however, in main the photographic emulsion will respond differently with and without an IR filter in place and filtering the projection light.

For those of you making color separations or color internegatives this will be noticed, it is measurable, for blue and cyan. The horizon colors.

This came up because an on-liner had a problem with color balance — it seemed nothing could be done; that the balance was illogical, showing sporadic response. Many of the often outspoken experts said it must be the failure of the poster — their skills weren’t good for the task. Not the task of doing, not even the task of diagnostic. Several days. Several efforts. The likely answer was pointed out by someone who has little experience printing; this according to themself — having only begun printing in the past three years. They are correct in the diagnosis of the problem while the other, over 10 thousand posters haven’t yet agreed. Experiment can’t convince them. Display can’t convince them.

They can’t see what they didn’t expect.

They have so little experience that they don’t understand, can’t accept yours.

They may be well intentioned — attempting to maintain knowledge from a field of past knowledge, but they are keeping alight a flame they never lit. They never were on that road, the path they say they’re maintaining. The field of casual knowledge wasn’t enough to work in a professional lab then, it certainly isn’t enough to sustain the field now. Experience doesn’t come in teacups

Refs:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/80983/how-does-infrared-relate-to-heat#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20special%20link,radiate%20at%20a%20higher%20frequency.