Overview of the Alternative Process

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Overview of the Alternative Process

First I wanna talk quickly about what is alternative processing? So we hear that term like the introduction to alternative processing. Well what does that exactly mean? In even before we had digital we had alternative processing and basically what that was was anything that wasn't using silver gelatin based papers or traditional silver color printing methodologies. So anything that kind of was outside that realm fell into that space. Today with how much digital technology we have you can almost include some of the traditional silver printing into that alternative processing as well because the inkjets and things like that have supplemented a lot of that different printing methods. So we've got an opportunity now to kind of extend what we would define as an alternative process. But there's a couple of things that make alternative processes sort of unique in that regard. The first of which is that they're contact printed. So when we look at an image, this is a four by five negative and t...

his is an eight by ten negative. So one of the things about alt processing is that the image is the size of the negative. So when we make the print if I wanna make a print that's eight by ten, I need an eight by ten negative 'cause the negative's actually gonna overlay the paper. So unlike in a traditional dark room when we have analog where we would go in and enlarge with an enlarger and we'd move the enlarger head up. We'd get a bigger image to print or in digital where I can just resize and resample. For all of these historical methodologies we're gonna be talking about, our negative needs to be the size of the image. So in that four by five case, here's a doubled up four by five. So in that case, here's the four by five negative and you can see it would overlay the image. So we end up with a print size this size. That's one of the pieces is our image size is our print size. The other one is the contact print, in which case the negative is actually gonna lay directly onto the paper. That's what we mean by contact printing, is the actual negative actually lays on the coded material paper and then we expose it to create the print. It's really kind of an interesting process. One of the reasons I actually like the contact printing is I can play with weird sizes. I can go in and resize and create different shapes and sizes. If I wanted to create with a digital negative, I could create a star in the computer and print that as my digital negative, where here I'm kind of limited a four by five format 'cause I refuse to cut up my large format negatives. I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I happen to not be one of them. The other piece is that this is a eight by ten camera. That eight by ten negative came off of a camera this size. In the old historical methodologies for doing this, or if you wanted to do what we would consider a traditional way of doing alt processing, you'd have to use a large format camera or your images would be contact printed at these tiny spaces. This is an eight by ten camera, and if you look at the back, the ground glass here is the size of the negative. To get an eight by ten print, I have to shoot this camera. If I wanted an 11 by 17 image, I'd have to shoot an 11 by 17 camera, which is about twice the size of this one. If you start to think about well, I'm kind of interested in these historical processes, but I don't know how to use this. I don't have one of these. Now if you do want one of these, I do have a class on introduction to large format in the CreativeLive catalog that you can go watch. But if you're not interested in going this route and dealing with the actual camera side, that leads us to the notion of the digital negative.

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