STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY | prints
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Images are printed using the 'carbon on paper' process. In common with the standard process for fine art digital printing, this involves using an inkjet printer to deposit pigment inks on cotton rag paper. One of the advantages of this process over traditional darkroom printing is that it allows finer control of toning. But instead of combining pigments with coloured inks to obtain the desired tone, as is usually done (for example in the ABW mode of Epson's wide-carriage printers), these prints are produced using a special inkset that contains only toned carbon pigments. Consequently, no coloured inks are used at all, and the resulting print is less likely to experience tonal shifts due to fading of the coloured inks.
Using this method, toning is adjusted by curves that control how much of each of the toned pigment inks is used. The curves for these prints were built by hand by the photographer, to give a slightly warm tone for middle greys and a cooler tone for highlights. The images on the website have been toned to match roughly the tone of the prints.
Recent developments in pigment inks and papers have ensured that such prints have extraordinary longevity. In the last couple of years, "carbon on paper" prints have moved beyond traditional darkroom prints in terms of the dynamic range and deepest black that can be achieved. In an amusing twist of history, carbon on paper prints are in some respects more like the predecessors of silver gelatin printing, sharing the texture and luminosity of platinum/palladium prints (and of course the chemical composition of 19th century carbon prints). And contrary to popular perceptions, ink printing is not a new photographic process; photogravures coexisted with silver prints for decades. What is new, however, is that ink now offers the best quality of the the available technologies.