Silver gelatin print rc paper9/6/2023 The largest mural-size prints are made with the horizontal enlarger, a 24” x 36" copy camera which Clyde converted into an enlarger. After the print has dried it is stored flat with weights to reduce wrinkles.Ĭlyde’s 2,200 square-foot darkroom houses one horizontal and seven vertical enlargers, including some that are antique. They wrap each end of the image around pool noodles then pass the print back and forth through the chemistry: rolling it and unrolling it again and again through developer, stop, two fixes, hypo-clear with selenium, and an hour wash before it is hung to dry. When developing his mural-size prints, his darkroom assistant, Neal Obendorf, stands on one side of the sink, while Clyde stands on the other. “The first time I did a huge print I had to wash it in a swimming pool," laughs Clyde, "I'm sure the chlorine wasn't too good for it! Eventually, I moved into a space where I built big sinks to handle the large sizes of my prints." His developing trays run down the center of the chemical room and allow him to develop 40” x 60" prints flat in the trays. Even today, with the widespread availability of inkjet printers, the process is still used for B&W prints. "But if you want to do it in fiber, in a historical, artistic and archivally correct way, you have to develop techniques just to handle the paper."Ĭlyde began making large prints as early as 1968. Over the last 120 or so years the silver gelatin print has undergone continuous tweaks and improvements, including polyethylene resin-coated (RC) paper in the 1970s and variable-contrast (VC) paper in the 1980s. DSI Digital Silver Prints ® are real silver gelatin (silver halide), black & white prints on a fiber base, or a premium RC base paper. Christopher Jamess The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, a reliable tome for darkroom developers, is a 700-page cookbook of chemical recipes and it notes the history of photographic printing methods from the obscure (salted paper, whey, and argyrotypes) to the cherished (silver gelatin, cyanotypes, and wet plate collodion). "If you were to use resin coated (RC) paper, you could just buy a machine that the enlarging paper runs through and it would be no big deal," comments Clyde. With fiber-based paper, there are enormous challenges making mural-size prints that require precise and meticulous procedures to ensure uniform quality and consistency in printing. If I am photographing something small like the Ghost Orchid I use a 4” x 5” view camera," explains Clyde, who most often works with an 8” x 10” view camera, but has a host of smaller and larger format view cameras. Some are also toned using selenium or sepia, which increases the archival rating of the print by converting metallic silver to a more stable silver. So, if I have a huge, broad landscape, I use the 12” x 20" view camera. All silver gelatin prints offered by Monochrome Gallery are printed by hand in a traditional darkroom on double-weight fiber base paper, and have an estimated archival rating of over 150 years. "I try to use the largest film possible for the particular subject I'm planning to photograph.
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