About the Technology

Updated: May 2011
Many people have expessed an interest in the technology behind my artwork. Here are all my secrets for anyone who wants to take a shot at it themselves.

I've learned (and re-learned) some things in the past year - a lot has changed.

Cameras and Film

Many of the images on this site were taken with an 8x10 camera, an older Century Universal, wooden, made back in 1910-1920. The 12" Goerz Dagor lens has a unique character all its own. The film was either Tri-X or the original FP4. These films scan well and delicate and sensitive prints almost make themselves.

These days I am using three cameras. My primary format is still 8x10. I have a Canham Lighweight which is a marvelous camera, built by Keith Canham. It's a joy to use, a piece of art in of itself. My lens is the Rodenstock 12 inch (300mm) Apo Sironar S. I also have one longer lens, a Nikon, that is excellent. My observation is that most of the photographers in the Hisotry of Photography used one lens and one camera for years at a time. This business of wide, normal and tele lenses was a marketing ploy to get you to buy more equipment. I have actually read posts on forums from people who carry around 9 lenses in their pack. Yikes!

My other two cameras are a 4x5 Ebony and a 6x7cm Mamiya 7 II. They are both top examples in their resepctive categories. I have been running ongoing tests to see the difference in "quality" (more on that word later) and what is possible with all 3 formats.

Film Testing

The good news is that these days I am very happy with my results. I decided to choose a film based on what it could do; and how long it might be around. Acros, which would have been a top contender, was left out because I couldn't figure out whether this film was going to be around for 20 years, or maybe be discontiunued next month. Ilford has made statements to the effect that "it is in black and white film for the long term" and if they had a good film, it was given a higher weight. Kodak is neutral, they have made substantial investments in late-model film, but they discontinue old standards regularly - and its hard to feel secure about what they will decide to deliver. Developing processes that take a long time, like letting a neg stand in a secondary bath for 20 minutes, were left out. Pyro was out of the initial running because I had had trouble with it in the Jobo, a rotary processor. It was my fault, and leaving it out was probably a mistake, one which will be addressed soon.

I got together with a colleague, Michael Cone, and we tested a lot of film and a lot of developers. Most of the top-rated film did really well. The best were Ilford's Delta, TMY2 and TMax 100. The best developer turned out to be Xtol. We decided that Ilford's Delta was the winner because it was just a hair sharper than TMax, it was from Ilford and it was cheaper! It was a nice bonus that the development times for Delta and TMY2 were alomst identical and we could develop them in the same drum. This is great when you have 50 or 100 sheets to develop from your latest trip.

I have to qualify that word "best." We were after a very specific set of criteria. The film was slated for the drum scanner, and then an inkjet print. The scanner is one of the best drum scanners ever made and the printer has a custom-mixed highly tuned black and white Inkset. Let me be clear: we weren't trying to produce a great contact print, or any darkroom print. We were trying to make the best inkjet print we could. The ISO was also a concern, we had to use the film, after all, and the low ISO Efke 25, which tested excellently, was let go. The idea was to find the film that would be easy to use, easy to acquire, would be around for a while, and which would create a negative that would scan extremely well, have very tight grain and excellent tonal reproduction.

Resolution

I'm probably going to annoy a lot of people with this statement, but frankly, resloution is the wrong question. There are endless discussion about resolution on the forums. Its useful to compare scanners but only because there is such a great disparity between the consumer-level flatbeds and the professional drum scanners. A 6x7 negative can have just as much resolution as an 8x10, however, the prints won't look the same. Both will exhibit sharp edges and reveal sharp details one never thought possible. The difference will be in the textural reproduction. The larger negs will have far more texture than the smaller ones, especially when making a larger print.

Consider the following scenario: a 4x5 camera takes a landscape photo with a telephone pole in it, the pole takes up a width of 1/4 of an inch of film. The same image, framed the same way, using an 8x10 camera would use a full inch of film to describe the same telephone pole. Regardless of lens resolution, or anything else, this is a substantial difference. The pole, taken with the 8x10, would look far more 3 dimensional in comparison. My personal observation is that the more textural information the print has the more a viewer will "feel" that they are in the scene. Placing the person in the scene is an aesthetic choice that is very important to my work.

Scanner and Scanner Software

The scanner is an 8,000 dpi Aztek Premier drum scanner. The key number is the optical resolution, which is also near to 8,000. I have a lot of choices of different apertures, which allows me to match each scan to the film's grain.

My Arithmetic Lesson:
A few years ago I purchased a Mamiya 645 fitted with a Kodak DCS ProBack, which gave me 16 megapixels. I was pretty impressed with this gadget but sold it after learning some basic arithmetic regarding numbers of pixels available for printing.

The 16 megapixel camera had a 4,000 by 4,000 chip. Turns out, if we can remember back to Junior High Math, that if you multiply a number with 3 0's by another number with 3 0's you get a number with 6 0's - or something in the millions. Few of us are rich enough to know how to deal with a concept like millions, so it just seems like a huge amount. We can hear Carl Sagan saying, "Billions and billions of stars."

Back to two-dimensional reality. Along a single dimension at the top of a print, that's 4,000 pixels for the whole image. If you want to make a 20 inch wide print you divide the 4,000 by 20. You end up sending 200 dpi to the printer. In other words, awful. My tests show that the "sweet spot' for most of the top inkjet printers is 720. There are a lot of people who would disagree with me about this. 360 is generally accepted as terrific, and I would agree.

Of course, it's fine if you never want to make more than a 10 inch print. Most commercial photographers wll never exceed that - their target is a magazine and almost all of them are 8 1/2 by 11 inches. Many artists, however, will want to print larger. My own prints start at 16x20 and go up to 32x40. People are always asking me to make them 20 foot prints these days. If you print at the 16x20 size or more a digital camera will not supply the quality you need. Every darkroom worker will tell you that if it isn't there in the negative, it's not going to be there in the print. This basic rule still applies.

Back to arithmetic for just a moment... I typically scan a 4x5 at 4,000 dpi. With a drum scanner, that's 4,000 pixels for every inch, so the 5 inch part of a 4x5 yields 20,000 pixels. If you make a 16x20 inch print, you divide the 20,000 by 20 and you get 1,000 dpi. Even at 40 inches, I am still at 500 dpi. They are sharp, grainless, smooth, and stunning. Oh, yeah, the 16,000 x 20,000 pixels of my 4x5 scans multiply out to 320 megapixels. I do my 8x10's at 2666 dpi and end up with 568 megapixels. Which would you want - 22mp or 568mp? Do you think there might be a difference in a large print?

I would be remiss if I ddn't mention that there is some real magic in the scanner software, Digital PhotoLab, by Aztek. It has a patented feature called CMS, which essentially goes one step further than other scanning software.

The process of scanning begins by mounting the negative on the drum. The scanner then previews the image. One uses curves and/or levels to modify the image to look like the desired result. A "CMS" file is created with the changes you have made and a host of other specifics. The scanner uploads this file to hardware registers in the scanner before the scan occurs and the scanner uses this file to manage what occurs in the scanning process. It is very different from scanning a RAW image and then applying curves to it after the fact. It effectively creates a different scanner for each image.

There are standard CMS files for many different types of film, but I generally use this feature to create a different CMS for each image - at least in black and white, where you can really see the difference.

Editor

There is only one fully featured editor these days - Photoshop. For those of you who are interested, I use an Intel Mac Pro, with a pile in it, of RAM for doing the editing.

The scanner software and the RIP software both work on a PC I built, a 3 Ghz Pentium 4. Despite the fact that comparing a Mac to a PC is like comparing a Maserati to a jackass, it's actually good to have the scanning and printing software on a different computer. The editing process, especially in 16 bit, takes a tremendous amount of processor resources. You wouldn't want to try and do all three operations on the same computer, Mac or PC.

The files sizes are fairly large. The 8 x10 images come off the scanner in 16 bit RGB, at about 3 gigabytes apiece. When taken to Grayscale, after initial editing, they are about a Gig. Add a couple of adjustment layers and they can get large.

Printer, Inkset, Paper and RIP

I have two printers, now both 54 inch wide Roland Pro 2's, one for color and one dedicated entirely to Black and White. I am now an Epson-free shop! They are exceptional pieces of machinery. They are made of metal, and have much better consistency than the plastic, smaller printers.

I run a d'Vinci system for color, the widest gamut, most accurate and smoothest color of any printer on the market.

For Black & White I start with the Cone Piezotone inkset and formulate my own custom dilutions. The new 12 cartridge Roland allows me to put a 6-dilution set of warm tone on one side and a 6-dilution set of cold tone on the other. I mix the two to create a beautiful neutral. I can also split tone any channel, in any direction and create custom sets for any black and white photographer.

Six dilutions of black give the prints a very long tonal range, the equal of which is found only in platinum prints - long known as the king of Black and White processes.

The inks are fully archival. They have a pure carbon base.

My favorite paper for amny years has been Hahnemuhle PhotoRag 308. It has a superb density range, and creates very 3 dimensional prints. It is 100% Cotton fiber, so it is fully archival. They started making paper in the 16th Century, and the paper feels like it.

This month I am starting to print on handmade Japaneser Kozo. I chose a weight that is very light and translucent. The light goes thru the print and bounces back off the white mat creating a luminescent effect. It's stunning, and I am anxious to begin a new portfolio of smaller, exquisite prints. I also have a lot of new work I want to see....

Calibration

I use a Gretag EyeOne spectrophotomer coupled with an iO Table. The Gretag EyeOne is spectacular, on target, accurate, everything you'd want from such a device. The iO Table allows me to create and read profiles with ease.

I use ErgoSoft's ColorGPS software for profiling. I read approximately 500 or more patches to make an accurate profile.

In Summary

When I started changing over to the digital medium I had 5 people utter the words' "Oh, you won't succeed unless you do the following....." The difficult part was that they all disagreed about what followed. There are obviously different paths to the same result, so I'll refrain from suggesting that my way is the only way to succeed.

In addition, you will find that there are titans of the industry - those who have extended the inkset, or created a particular piece of fantastic software - and while there is much to learn from them they all disagree as well. Further, they are all nuts - and I say this with the greatest affection. They apparently had to be very opinionated to succeed in their creations, they had to make some assumptions and stick by them. However, some of them don't even speak in a normal language, its some gibberish about gamma or arguments about color spaces and targets or micron slices. The long and the short of it is that we all have to do our own testing and trust our results.

It has taken a long time to learn each of the different parts. There were a lot of new concepts to understand and embrace. If you are just starting out, give yourself some time. You have a lot of patches to print (and read) before you can print anything at a consistent, professional level.

However, now that I have made it this far, I can say without hesitation that I am thrilled with the results.

Lenny Eiger
eiger@eigerstudios.com