Positive Negative Notes

It turns out my hunch was right. In “The Rabbit Hole,” a couple of posts back, I went on about muddy prints. But near the end of the post, I mentioned trying another round of prints. At the time, I thought the problem might not be the negative or the script but the way I was using it. Maybe these new negatives required a new approach to printing.

What I’ve experimented with this time around is sticking with the same exposure time, coat after coat after coat. In this manner, I slowly build the print from shadow to highlight, one zone at a time. The ideal time varies from one negative to the next but the range seems to be 1½ - 3 minutes. I love that. Exposing in this manner, highlights start to emerge around coat 6. Curiously, this method takes me back to my early days of gum printing when I worked exclusively with analog/film negatives. What goes around comes around.

But that's radically different from the way I’ve been printing the past few years. My previous digital negatives called for an extreme range of exposure times and formula variations. The first few coats applied might take 3 minutes each until shadow detail was established. But as the print evolved, subsequent layers required more and more time to capture highlights. 15 to 20 minute exposures became the norm. Switching to the QTR print driver with no knowledge of how to use it amplified the problem. Highlight layers were taking up to 45 minutes. In the winter sun!

Unfortunately, the finished product was really appealing. More contrast and more color dynamism than ever before. I wanted the look without the long exposures.

That’s when I took the digital negative workshop. I was hoping to come away with a gum curve I could use with the QTR driver that would modify the way my Epson 7600 printer did its job. Several of us brought Sandy King up to North Carolina last winter to teach a workshop. Sandy taught for years at Clemson University. He made the switch from analog to digital negatives years ago and had been working with QTR for a good long while. Sandy is also an amazing carbon printer.

The carbon process is first cousin to gum so I figured he’d have a basic understanding of what a good gum negative might look like. And in fact, the prototype negative I started working with after the workshop was his carbon curve with minor changes in the script. Some 9 months and several tweaks later, I feel like I’m almost out of the digital morass I put myself in during the winter of my discontent.

Trying to come up with the perfect gum negative is as elusive and chameleon a quest as there is in all photography. That’s because there’s no established end goal for gum printers. Everyone knows what a great black and white print looks like when they see one. The same goes for platinum, cyanotype, photogravure. Almost all the hand-made processes have a well-defined look of their own. One of the things I love about gum though is how flexible the process is. And how varied that final look can be.

As I continue to work with negatives using the same gum curve, I should pick up more tricks for coaxing them along to a satisfactory end.