Hi, Monday, January 6, 2003, 3:19:32 AM, you wrote:
[...] > That is the part I am still thinking about. And considering what > I want. I didn't really anticipate that to get good photos I > would have to be in collaboration with another visual artist > (the guy at the lab who looks at the prints and makes judgment > calls -- admittedly sometimes slight judgment calls when the > roll is first printed, but judgment calls nevertheless). This is > the part my brain is still circling. I don't mind the idea of > collaboration -- for now. This can be an extremely expensive option. Here in London labs typically charge £50.00 (~ $70.00 US) per hour if you want to collaborate _in_the_lab_ with the printer. I used to use a lab here which I know is capable of making the finest colour prints I've ever seen, because they printed them for an exhibition I once visited. But this was sponsored by Reuters and a couple of other global corporations, and the lab was no doubt pulling out all the stops because they knew that the show could generate customers for them (it did). However, they weren't able to get even close to that level of quality for me with the money I was paying them. In the end I found an amateur minilab, in the heart of the advertising district of London, which does work that's better than the pro-lab for the same kind of money. However, when it comes to getting bigger, exhibition-quality prints I'm one of the people who prefer digital-from-film to any other financially feasible medium that I've seen, and I intend to explore that for myself this year. > But the more I think about it, the more I mind it. And in the > future, if money ever allows, I will do my own printing using > whatever technology is the best at the time that I can also > afford. My preference at the moment is for what water-colourists call 'giclee'. Here they scan their watercolour, and print it digitally onto watercolour paper specially sized for inkjet printers. The results are very impressive indeed. Of course, any image can be digitized, including your colour negs. The important thing, from what I've learned, is to have a complete end-to-end colour management system including profiles which match your specific inkset to the specific paper you're using. Coming from a painting background you might find it useful to talk to some other painters who are following this route, where the vocabulary might be less alien. --- Bob
