The Ten-in-One Crew, Coleman Bros. Show, 1985Another from the Carnival series. The reds in the nylon polo shirt and the painted staging and ticket stand totally defeated the interneg/RA process I tried to print these with twenty-five years ago. The look of these reds as I inspect the post with a suite of browsers with and without color management reminds me precisely of that problem. Take my word for it, the reds are the exact to-die-for color that they look like in the original Kodachromes, when I print the scans from my new machine.
So a side note since Mike J has just been doing some posts on Kodachrome over at TOP. I agree that Kodachrome was an entire medium in itself. Hell, I made my living shooting thousands of rolls of K64 for commercial clients over a couple of decades, and also used it for a small number of personal projects like this one. So to print these pictures, the print process has to keep the "signature" of the Kodachrome medium that I used to make them. I'd like to make fluid-mount scans on a better scanner from these chromes but it will have to wait. Meanwhile I'm very happy to have these 10x15 prints.
An interesting sidelight is that I haven't the slightest desire to make my digital captures "look like Kodachrome." Kodachrome was such an aggressively powerful partner that you just had to learn to play along. Digital capture has a neutrality, a lack of "signature" that I quite enjoy. To pretend it should look like K64 strikes me as ridiculous, at best. It's as foreign to me as making a "monochrome" picture from something I shot while working in color, as with a dSLR. I can't accept prints from these carnival pictures that don't make an exacting effort to understand the look of Kodachrome. Because that's what was in my head as I shot the pictures. The palette of Kodachrome.
In the same way, I find it's impossible to make a black and white conversion from anything I shoot with a dSLR because I shoot the pictures with my head thinking color, period. The other side of the coin is, I don't miss the element of color in pictures I've made on black and white film over the past forty+ years. I was shooting in black and white, no color need apply.
4 comments:
Fascinating, but what is the interneg and RA process? What's RA?
scott
Scott,
RA is the Kodak nomenclature for the chemistry set used, beginning in the early 80s as I recall, to process chromogenic color prints. So Ektacolor paper used the RA process, and Fuji followed the convention with its papers, just as they used Kodak's C41 standard for color neg film. RA is still the standard color printing chemistry, so is about to become an alternate process I guess...
Internegative film was specially formulated to take the information from a color transparency and make it available for printing as a color negative. I used 4x5 (boxed and handled exactly like 4x5 sheet film) and used a regular enlarger to print negatives from the Kodachromes at about 4.5 inches wide. I had these processed at a pro lab near my studio (I had a commercial studio in Hartford, CT, at the time) like any other C-41 sheet film.* Then I made 8x12 inch RA prints from those inter-negatives on 11x14 paper, working in my darkroom and running the RA process in a JOBO.
The internegative translated the enormous density range of a color transparency into the very short (and color-masked) density range of a well-made color negative. That made it accessible for chromagenic printing. The handling of tone was admirable, but the combination was far less successful at capturing the Kodachrome color palette. The edgy sharpness of Kodachrome also took a hit.
Direct reversal printing--an inherently high-contrast medium--would have required multiple masks to deal with these originals, with no assurance the color would be better. Cibachrome had even shorter tonal scale. It probably would have done better on the color, especially the important reds, but it would have needed highlight masks, shadow masks, specific-color-control masks: at that rate I might as well have given up and learned dye transfer. Life looked too short for that.
*As an aside, I had to use a different pro lab than my usual one, because just as I never used color negative film for any sort of assignment in the 80s, my usual lab didn't even handle the C-41 process: had to go to the lab the portrait and wedding guys used. And was surprised they could handle sheet film.
I see -- reversing the color wasn't the only problem, and the interneg needed to serve as a sort of #1 paper. Local color labs still prefer to produce chemically processed prints, from color negative or more often digital rgb input. Are they using RA? Maybe it's not alternative yet?
scott
Right, not alternative yet. I haven't done any chemical color printing in twenty years but I don't think RA was ever replaced, or even had a competitor. The hybrid process used for the gigantic color prints so popular on the art scene these days are still often shot on large format film, scanned and Photoshopped, then output digitally to RA paper processed in huge commercial roller transport machines. Pigment-inkjet is gradually replacing this as printers wider than 44 inches become more available.
The interneg also has to provide the orange overall/proportional masking that color print paper "expects" to see. That mask also makes a color negative much more complicated to scan than a transparency. It was a decade or more after scanning became the norm for transparencies in publishing before software writers got a handle on extracting the correct color negative data (with different profiles needed for every film) past the masking.
I understand Joel Meyerowitz now prefers digital prints of his early 8x10 color work like Cape Light. That was shot on tungsten-balanced (better for long exposures) film and color corrected with the enlarger filter pack, which was a piece of cake in the darkroom. I have work from the 80s shot that way, and as of the last I tried, SilverFast couldn't begin to understand the negatives. But I'm way overdue for an upgrade, and the prospect of being able to access those negatives again could pry the money from me.
Post a Comment