me!

I live near Houston, Texas with my family. By day, I look for oil and gas in my job as a geophysicist. When I am not looking for oil and gas, I am looking for the oddball scene that I think will make an interesting photograph. I then make prints from the more successful pictures using one of the many rapidly disappearing processes I have spent years trying to master. Currently, my top three favorite processes are platinum-palladium, gum-platinum and photogravure, with toned silver-gelatin prints following close on their heels.

I could wax lyrical about how these prints look and feel in the hand. There is a depth to all of these processes that is hard to duplicate by spraying ink on the surface of a piece of paper. That said, I do my fair share of inkjet prints, and in fact, all of my color work is printed in this manner. The level of quality in inkjet prints is very, very, very good nowadays, and it takes a true print-sniffer in some cases to determine whether a print is an inkjet or a silver-gelatin print. And of course, the use of photoshop offers so much control over the final appearance of a print.

Many of my older prints are made with in-camera negatives. Since almost all of the so-called alternative processes expose the print with a lengthy dose of UV radiation, prints could only be made by contact printing with a negative the same size of the final print. The consequence of this requirement meant that photographers desiring large prints had to either carry around a rather large view camera or learn the difficult task of making enlarged negatives from smaller cameras. When I first learned this process, the large camera approach was the only viable option. So many of my earlier photos were made using 8×10, 7×17 and 12×20 inch view cameras. If you have never seen a 12×20 inch camera on a tripod, it looks somewhat like what you might imagine would be a comfortable treehouse for a small poodle. The digital imaging revolution that has occurred over the last ten years has made this approach an option instead of a requirement nowadays.

Currently, I do a large proportion of my printing using a hybrid approach whereby I make negatives using an inkjet printer and then print those negatives in the traditional hand-coated manner common to platinum-palladium or gum bichromate practice. For photogravure, I use a digitally printed positive to make either the traditional etched copper plate or the modern polymer gravure plate which is subsequently printed using ink, paper and an etching press.