contact prints from digital negs

Kevin Sullivan is a keener. I spent over an hour on the phone with him yesterday while he told me about his customer’s enthusiasm for alternative photographic processes. The excitement is about the convergence of old and new techniques: making platinum, palladium, kallitype and cyanotype prints from large digital negatives. The process generally goes like this:

1. create a high-resolution image
2. get it into the computer
3. print it onto a special transparency medium at the desired print size(s)
4. make contact prints

His customers are making the high-res images with large-format field cameras, scanning the negatives, tweaking the negatives in photoshop, applying curves, the up-resing to 360ppi (at full size) using stochastic filters (he mentioned a plug-in called Rastus). Then special transparency paper from Pictorio is loaded into a high-end Epson printer, negatives produced for each desired print size, then laying these negatives over photographic papers and exposed either under an enlarger or in the sun.

This gets me thinking about other kinds of output, recalling my lcd-monitor contact prints, rendering negatives of non-photographic images (ie: data, signal, and noise), and perhaps even contact printing film negative. Hmm.

• pictorio ohp film
• rastus plugin
• bostick-sullivan

• contact printing from monitor
• cyanotype process
• chrysotype process
• kallitype process