There are metal replacement toners that replace the silver in a print with either gold or platinum. This way the print can be made normally with an enlarger and silver chemistry to overcome the contact printing limitation. Toning improves the longevity of the print and provides many of the same tonal effects, depending on how long the print sits in the bath. Unfortunately, the chemicals involved are quite toxic. I remember one of the instructors at the Rayko darkroom in San Francisco running a "toning day" and it was very busy with a number of people coming in to tone their work and share the considerable material and hazmat fees for the chemicals.
"unlike silver gelatin prints that hold the chemicals in a layer on top of the paper, platinum photography uses chemicals that are soaked into the paper, so the image lies embedded in its fibers."
Fiber paper for silver prints is also a thing, and easily available from commercial sources. It requires more extensive washing compared to RC (resin coated) paper, and it tends to curl and warp after wetting. To get prints flat after drying, you need a big heated press that looks like a giant panini maker.
I think selinium toning is like this, and that's definitely in the dubious stuff you really don't want to get on your skin category. The prints do look gorgeous after selinium toning though!
And I agree, fibre paper is awesome but the drying and mounting process tends to be onerous compared to resin coated paper, so I rarely do it. Saying that, I do happen to have a 16*20 capable heated paper press, but compared to fibre, there really is no contest for convenience!
Fibre prints are however still a layer on the surface, usually over the top of a baryta (barium sulphite) layer that acts as a white base. Platinum-Palladium prints really are soaked into the fibre of your paper.
I got into film photography too late to ever visit Rayko. How I wish it had survived, somehow. Having a whole darkroom for rent in town would be incredible.
San Francisco has the Harvey Milk Photo Center, which has a huge dark room and film processing facilities. It's pretty awesome. I've taken several classes there. https://www.harveymilkphotocenter.org/
In case anyone from central Indiana stumbles upon this thread, the Indianapolis Art Center also has a darkroom with inexpensive classes. I’m anxiously awaiting my next class this fall.
Wow, thank you! Sounds like I can even learn how to use the darkroom there. Boy, I love that we have stuff like this here. Shoutout to Oscar’s in SOMA for doing a great job developing my stuff for me, fwiw.
Absolutely. There are regular darkroom classes you can sign up for. It's kind of hard to get a spot because the classes are small but my teacher said people also have learned how on YouTube and then come in to practice.
The toners don't replace the silver so much as alter or supplement it. I used selenium back in the 80s and the (fiber paper) prints so treated have held up almost perfectly. The tonal difference it very subtle. Mounting them on archival board or storing them in neutral buffered paper boxes is essential for maximum longevity.
I have a book that is only about photographic toners. I think that’s where I read that many vintage “platinum” prints are actually platinum toned Kallitypes. Still platinum on the paper in the end.
>You can’t take a small negative and project it onto the paper, as you do with an enlarger for silver gelatin prints.
Pretty much sums up the point. Using 8x10 or whatever size negatives when film rolls were coming about is a non-starter for the general public.
The cost seems very high as the other commenter has mentioned also. From a quick search purchasing a kit will give you a printing cost of ~$15/photo. This immediately relegates it to the realm of hobbyists with money. Canvas prints of that size may be a bit cheaper for someone seeking something that’s a bit more special than a regular photo.
It's possible to print large negatives from digital files. The results are stunning if you manage to get the curve right.
I've done a few times, lots of trial and error and I never could get a curve that worked perfectly on multiple setups or even on multiple shots with the same setup. A bit of tweaking is required for every shot, in my experience.
It's just that the whole thing is slow, expensive and error prone in every step of the way. It's a labor of love and it shows.
If you're going to buy platinum / palladium reagents, which aren't cheap, I suggest printing the digital negative on Mitsubishi Pictorico OHP. Check which of the inks in your printing system is more opaque to UV to improve dynamic range.
Use the media that your already have to dial in your pre-processing to some extent.
>The first reason is linked to one of the drawbacks of platinum photography. Although the resulting images are far superior, platinum does not react as quickly to light as silver. This means that you can only make an image using the contact printing technique
> Wouldn't that just mean you have to wait longer?
You would have to wait much longer with a standard enlarger, probably several days and that's without taking into account reciprocity failure. In practice, it just wouldn't work.
I haven't tried platinotype myself since platinium and paladium are so expensive, but I do print a lot of cyanotype which has a similarly low sensitivity and I built a UV enlarger for that, which works quite well with exposure times on the order of a few minutes for enlarging 35mm onto A5 paper.
It requires a 40W 365nm UV LED source though, cooling for the negative in order not to burn it, and a few other tricks to get it to work well.
> Wouldn't that just mean you have to wait longer?
In theory, yes. The actual values may help. I’ve heard exposure times cited around eight minutes. That’s for contact printing using the sun as a source. I don’t know off-hand how much light an enlarger will deposit on paper, but it is a few orders of magnitude less than the sun. For the sake of estimating, let’s say 3 orders of magnitude.
This gives an exposure time of 5 days. Note that you’d want to make a test strip or two—someone who knows what they’re doing might want two test strips to dial in the exposure settings, at which point it takes you 15 days to make the first print (but then only 5 days for each additional print from the same negative).
I guess good thing you can "cheat" nowadays with digital enlarging (in the case where you "just" want to have a long lasting picture. I have pictures of my great great grandparents, I don't trust that any of my digital pictures will last 4 generations)
Do they produce enough UV to expose platinotype? Most of the modern lights you see are LEDs that produce mostly visible light.
You can get UV bulbs, but at this point in our scenario we’re modifying enlargers, and the enlarging lens may focus differently in the UV region from the visible region (something you’d have to check and compensate for). Normally you’d focus an enlarger visually, perhaps with a grain focuser—maybe at this point you’d be focusing manually with the grain focuser in the visible region and then making some calculated adjustment for UV. Or you’d be hunting down a lens which was designed to have the same focal length into the relevant part of the UV spectrum.
> Normally you’d focus an enlarger visually, perhaps with a grain focuser—maybe at this point you’d be focusing manually with the grain focuser in the visible region and then making some calculated adjustment for UV
Yes, I have some experience with this (see my other reply in this thread) and it's a real problem but there is an easy fix.
Instead of using a grain-focuser (which would also be dangerous for the eyes anyway, and good quality UV lights don't leak much into the visible) you use plain white paper, cheap paper that is treated with optical brighteners.
These brighteners glow in the UV to make the paper look whiter, which means that under your UV enlarger, they turn the projected UV into a visible image. You can then focus using a regular looking glass to look at the paper. And UV-blocking sunglasses (you can easily test if they actually block UV: the paper will not glow at all if UV-blocking glasses are in the way).
Some lenses are corrected for UV-Vis focus shift, but they are generally extremely expensive.
This is exactly it. Platinum printing requires UV. All of the platinum printing darkroom setups I have seen all had large and powerful UV sources for contact printing.
Negatives are smaller than you typically want the final images to be, with contact printing you positive images would be the same size as the negative.
Printing for end user consumption almost always involved enlargement.
The cost, inconvenience, and increased light of large format cameras with silver based films made them unpopular too despite the reduction in quality.
Similar to the quality vs convenience tradeoff that results in people using cell phones as cameras.
It depends what you mean by longer. One thing not mentioned is that platinum prints expose under ultra violet light, light which doesn’t transmit as well through glass to begin with, coupled with several orders of magnitude less sensitivity than silver emulsions.
Rather than a few seconds you’d be waiting several days for a comparable exposure.
You can laser print an image (any image!) onto a projector transparency (overhead sheet) and do a contact print that way. Then you take it out into the sun and use that to expose the paper. Contact prints require very little resolution so a laser print (or an inkjet print) is generally fine despite not being that high a PPI.
The "authentic" way would be to create an internegative with an enlarger. You might use reversal-processed B+W film for example (creating a B+W positive), or create an interpositive and then use that to create an internegative (more steps obviously). Either way it's true that the analog process is a bit of a pain, but modern "hybrid" workflows completely remove this.
It's not just platinum prints that have this problem btw. Cyanotype paper is also extremely slow, contact prints are almost always the strategy there too. Given how slow it is, and the particular range of UV-sensitivity it needs, it's difficult to do indoors actually, but fortunately the universe has seen fit to bless us with a large, powerful UV source overhead for around 12 hours per day.
Same for azo paper and some of the other silver papers even... the kodak "postcard cameras" using 122 rollfilm (not 120!) were usually contact-printed and the simplest answer was to do it outdoors. Slow paper is actually easier if you are working outdoors, because it gives a longer working time and exact light levels or split-second timing doesn't matter.
Chemistry was simply much slower in the early days, a "fast film" in the early days was like ISO 8 iirc, and paper was even slower, you had "fractional ISO" in many cases. And a "fast lens" was a rapid rectilinear at f/8. Today we just take it for granted that an exposure is a fraction of a second but that was not at all a common thing in the early days of photography.
The idea of modern cameras with backlit CMOS sensors shooting ISO 256,000 with a f/1.2 lens would have vaporized a medieval peasant instantly. /s
And the idea of internegatives/interpositives has pretty much faded over time too. But this used to be a much more normal part of darkroom work. When you hear the term "unsharp mask" used... that actually comes from the times when it would be a literal mask, an interpositive that you enlarged together with the negative to control edge sharpness.
But yes you are right that analog photography is a rich person's hobby these days... the prices are significantly higher than even when I was doing it 10-15 years ago (which was already into the digital era). Almost all of these processes run on silver or platinum or other organometallic chemistry (with a few exceptions like cyanotypes) and the "metallic" part of that chemistry has climbed hugely in price, on top of sales volumes collapsing. The precious metal prices are why photo stores/etc will often take exhausted fixer for free... there is a commercially significant amount of silver in that bottle, and it all came out of your film/paper!
Carbon prints are both more stable and have a wider possible tonal range than platinum prints do. I’m not sure where he got the idea that platinum prints have a wide tonal range from. While they have exquisite highlight separation, they tend to have a rather compressed, flat tonal range. The dimensionality he talks about due to the emulsion sinking into the paper fibers is also a reason for the compressed tonal range.
Very few people use pure platinum salts. Most prefer a mix of platinum and palladium to get better darker tones. It is also more likely that vintage “platinum” prints are probably platinum toned Kallitypes.
All of the positive things he attributes to platinum prints are probably better applied to carbon prints. I think carbon is the ultimate printing medium for monotone photographs. Maximum control of tonal range, detail, and the best longevity.
Here's a resource for anyone that really wants to dive into this. Dick Arentz is a modern day master of the technique. His book is pretty much the definitive resource.
It is of course still possible to do--you can get the chemicals, the cameras, the paper, etc. There are people still doing it. The number is not very large. It's nontrivial expense and labor. The prints are indeed very nice.
Hi everyone- I’m Matt Locke, who wrote this WITI, and I just want to say I love all your comments, especially about selenium toning, which we also did at Art School. This thread is quite the nostalgia trip for me. Thanks!
You don't need a darkroom for film development. A changing bag and some light proof tanks allow for this. To develop 54 or larger large format film (for contact printing) you need light proof trays, or you can use a 54 adapter for a jobo tank.
I guess you then have to have some registration holes in the paper + film to align them correctly if you want to check paper exposure during development, but my understanding is that the process is slow enough that you again aren't in a darkroom, you are exposing the paper with sunlight, and then fixing can be in a tray.
WITI is a really cool newsletter BTW. I use this as an alternative to reddit/kottke/twitter in terms of fresh/interesting content, just because I'm sick and tired of all the nonsense on the other platforms.
"unlike silver gelatin prints that hold the chemicals in a layer on top of the paper, platinum photography uses chemicals that are soaked into the paper, so the image lies embedded in its fibers."
Fiber paper for silver prints is also a thing, and easily available from commercial sources. It requires more extensive washing compared to RC (resin coated) paper, and it tends to curl and warp after wetting. To get prints flat after drying, you need a big heated press that looks like a giant panini maker.