Carl Weese in the NYT "Lens" blog

[Oren Grad]

APUGgers might enjoy today's feature in the New York Times' "Lens" blog, a selection of large format work from Carl Weese's ongoing drive-ins project:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/showcase-110/

[mjs]

Mr. Weese uses both a 7-by-17-inch Korona Panoramic banquet camera and an 8-by-10 Deardorff. Traditionally, he has created platinum contact prints of his drive-in photographs. In recent years, though, he has also begun to make monochrome digital prints, which allow for greater detail.

An interesting statement, don't you think? I wonder if it was the photographer's or a conclusion reached by the reporter?

[Oren Grad]

What the reporter didn't say, which is understandable because he had only so much room to play with and it would be a relatively minor point for the NYT's readers, is that Carl's inkjets show more detail because he uses inkjets to make enlargements, whereas his Pt/Pd prints are contact prints. There are two things going on. First, whether you're printing analog or inkjet, enlarging makes fine spatial detail easier to see, albeit at some expense in subtlety of rendering - most people can see details with the naked eye in a 14x34 that they would need a loupe to discern in the 7x17 contact print. And second, when the contact print is Pt/Pd on art paper rather than silver gelatin, much of the very finest detail in the negative is effectively suppressed anyway - tonality is the great strength of Pt/Pd, not fine spatial detail.

That's all.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Congrats on the feature, Carl!

[carlweese]

Congrats on the feature, Carl!

Thanks, David.

Oren has it exactly right about the "detail" quote. I mentioned that subject details that go unnoticed in a 7x17 contact print sometimes add to the experience of viewing the same picture at, say, 16x40 inches with a digital enlargement. The statement got compressed a bit. Given the incredibly restricted space the writer gets to use for a Lens article I though Shane did a wonderful job of getting the story out with maximal compression.---Carl

[David A. Goldfarb]

Just a heads up that Carl Weese is offering a selection of three images printed either in pt/pd or inkjet at very reasonable prices on Mike Johnston's blog, "The Online Photographer," including one of the drive-in images (which I've ordered)--

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2010/04/the-top-platinum-print-offer.html#comments

The offer is only running for a week.