cgardner Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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I'm a no apologies Adam's fanboy having learned to make zone system prints using his books soon after getting my first camera.
Adam's original prints are amazing close-up, in person, on your desk....
Back in the early 80s when I was production manager of USIA's Manila publishing center one of the local staff who checked in job materials send from HQ in Washington came in with one of the big shipping cases we use and said, "There's a note on this saying these photos are valuable, where shall still I put them?" I looked at the shipment manifest, saw Ansel Adams prints, smiled ear-to-ear and said, "You can leave them right here".
Topic, a magazine we printed and shipped to Africa in English and French, was doing a story on Adams using about a dozen of his most famous shots. My challenge was to do them justice in their reproduction on a high speed web press on less than gallery quality paper stock. previously worked at National Geographic where my job was making halftones, duo-tones and tri-tones (sepia created on a 4/C press using CYMK) and while working there had reproduced Edward Curtis photos from an original set Geographic had in its library for a book on Native Americans. I used similar techniques to reproduce Adams prints, combining to halftones one with the shadow detail and the other with the highlight detail — much the same way HDR is done in Photoshop today — to create a double black duotone printed on press with a double hit of PMS Black producing much greater ink density and more shadow detail than a normally produced halftone in a magazine has. They turned out as well or better than any other reproduction in book or magazine format I've seen since.
The idea of "losing" a few of the prints crossed my mind, but all that I have are memories of working with them a set of Cromalin proofs of the duotones in the sizes used in the magazine I filed away somewhere.
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