Techniques

I use a Pentax Mark 1 full-frame digital SLR camera with various lenses. Recent and ongoing technological improvements in camera technology have made capturing images with much less expensive cameras (or phones) quite easy. They typically do not, however, offer much of the flexibility and creativity available in an SLR camera. However, I am not snobby enough to assert that beautiful photographs cannot be taken with simple cameras. The camera is a tool for the creative process. It is the process that is important to me, not the tools used.

One of the real challenges in photography continues to be the production of quality photographic prints from ink jet printers. Again, a lot of innovation has occurred in this area to make prints stable over time. For my color work, I use an Espon photo-class printer that uses Ultra Chrome pigment-based inks. I have never been satisified, however, with the output of color printers for the production of black and white images. Since the blacks are typically made by mixing different colored inks, most black and white prints, to my eye, have color casts. In addition, since the different colored inks age differently, these prints are not very stable over time.

For these reasons, all of my black and white prints are produced using carbon-based inks. This involves replacing the ink cartridges in the printer with an ink set that includes 7 different shades of black, carbon-based ink cartridges. I therefore have a dedicated black and white printer (Epson 3880) with black-only inks. In order to get a proper ink densities on different paper types, my workflow includes printing through the Quad ToneRIP software. This allows for the creation of specific ink profiles that match different paper types and the different outputs that I am trying to acheive.