9/11/26

How I make Inkjet Print Copies of My Silver Gelatin Prints


                 How I make Inkjet Print Copies of My Silver Gelatin Prints

 
      Inkjet print  15x15" -- a copy of a 10x10" silver gelatin print entitled      
"A Flowering Bush on a foggy day in a Milwaukee County Park" 
from my 1983-84 project Images of Eden.  

I made the 10x10" silver gelatin print of the image above with a 2 1/4 black&white negative.
Because I stopped making silver prints and negatives in 2003, I made a digital copy of the 
negative with a digital scanner (designed for negatives) and created a digital file formatted 
appropriately for making the 15x15" inkjet copy print; then I copied that digital copy file 
of the negative and reduced the image size of the file and formatted it 
appropriately for publishing the image on this blog page.

 There are several ways of making high quality digital copy files of silver gelatin prints,
 or photo images in other media.  Many galleries sell digital copy prints which they 
sometimes refer to as "fine art reproductions" or Giclée Prints.

Most recently I have been making my digital copy files of gelatin silver prints 
with a high quality digital camera.    

Another option is to give the negative or the silver gelatin print to a professional digital
services business.  They have high quality scanners to copy negatives and prints. For 
an additional fee they could also make the inkjet copy prints for you from the files.

The wonderful thing about the digital process is that after the digital copy files are made 
they can be adjusted with digital editing software (like Adobe Photoshop) to
make any improvements to the silver image that I felt are necessary.

I have been able to make very high quality inkjet copy prints of my original silver gelatin 
images that, in many cases, are more articulate and preferable to me than
the actual vintage silver gelatin prints I made many years ago . . . with
the added benefit of the archival papers and inks I chose to use
for  making the inkjet copy prints.

. . . . . . 


This project was published on my blog's
Welcome Page on September 11, 2026
especially for the Epilogue to my
mini Inkjet Print project:


 Here is the list of the Eight 2026 mini Inkjet Print Thematic projects published so far:
"It Is Always ONE"  June 5, 2026
"Seeing Things"  June 19, 2026 =
~ The Spark ~ "A Flashing Forth!" July 1, 2026
Seven Windswept Symmetrical Photographs July 19, 2026
"Nine Quirky Photographs" July 23, 2026
"Six Thing-Centered Photographs" with An Exercise in Reading Image Juxtapositions  August 11, 2026

Related Blog Projects:


Welcome Page  to The Departing Landscape blog-website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography blog projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, Introductory texts, and more.

Posted by Steven D. Foster at 12:37 PM

9/10/26

The Complete 2023 ~ 2026 INKJET PRINT PROJECTS


The Complete 
2023~2026 
Inkjet Print Archive Project 
Published December 23, 2024; revised in December 2025, this updated blog 
project page is dedicated to all of my 2023-2024-2025 Inkjet Print Projects 

The Complete Inkjet Print Archive Project
currently consists of the following projects:



The images have been organized into a list of Thematic groups


(plus a small collection of

Also included are the following Inkjet Print Thematic Projects:

Twenty-five photographs, printed 16x20"on 20x24"paper 

Blue Angels    (A Photography Project about Death, Angels & the Blue Pearl (the blog version was revised April 2023)  Inkjet prints made in 2023 (image sizes vary from 16x20" to 18x21")

Silent Dialogues  18x18" images on 20x24" paper Inkjet prints made in 2023

18x21" images on 20"x 24" paper Inkjet prints made in February, 2024 

Time & Timelessness  February 1, 2025  All images in this thematic project were drawn from the Complete Inkjet Print Project 2023-2024-2025

The Memory of Light  March 4, 2025  All images in this thematic project were drawn from the Complete Inkjet Print Project 2023-2024-2025

Black and White Photographs   April 3, 2025  All images in this thematic project were drawn from the Complete Inkjet Print Project 2023-2024-2025

Winter's End, Winter's Stones & Plants  April 17, 2025  All images in this thematic project were drawn from the Complete Inkjet Print Project 2023-2024-2025

Angelic Presence  September 2, 2025    Photographs made in Vermont, Salem, Main & New York  
An Inkjet Print Project 

Hidden Gems October 1, 2025  A Collection of 30+ Overlooked Important Photographs with Commentary on each Inkjet Print image. 

Humor?  In My Photography?  December 4, 2025  An Inkjet Print Project


Symmetrical River Songs February 3, 2026  
Symmetrical  Photographs constructed with images made in 1988-89 from my project River Songs
 
Homage to M.C. Escher & MANNERISM  February 15, 2026
A "Wonder Room" filled with PhotoGraphic Curiosities

The 2026 Inkjet Print Archive Project March 2026

BabySitting Claire Symmetrical Photographs       May, 2026
An Inkjet Print Project based on revisions of images I made in 2016 for my blog project Babysitting Photographs

A Collection of Eight 2026 mini, theme-related projects                               

It Is Always One  June 5, 2026  (An Inkjet Print Thematic Project : with Commentary)  

Seeing Things  June 19, 2026  (An Inkjet Print Thematic Project : with Commentary)  

~The Spark~ "A Flashing-Forth!"  July 1, 2026  (Five Favorite Photographs associated with very Personal Experiences)  

Windswept Symmetrical Photographs July 19, 2026  (An Inkjet Print Thematic Project) 

Nine Quirky Photographs July 23, 2026  (An Inkjet Print Thematic Project with Commentary)

"Six Thing-Centered Photographs" with An Exercise in Reading Image Juxtapositions  August 11, 2026




Introduction
I began the Inkjet Print Project in early 2023, some time after I purchased my new Epson 6000P printer.  In mid 2022 I had scheduled to have cataract eye surgeries on each of my eyes in mid, and than late January 2023.  Both eyes suffered from retinal tears which required me to put off printing for a while until I was able to come up with a way of printing despite sore, healing eyes and a condition referred to as disparity of vision.  Printing images I had never printed before was my first initiative, and that idea then just kept growing and changing once I began a more in-depth decision-making process about which of my favorite pictures I should print and their appropriate sizes. 

I decided first to make 12x12" "study" prints of everything that seemed to me worthy of being printed.  This decision had been influenced by an earlier six year project, The 1994-2000 Studies Project in which I made miniature snap-shot sized square silver-gelatin printed images from a large archive of earlier made 35mm negatives.  I loved the square format and enjoyed the process of reducing the long rectangular negatives I had made with my 35mm film camera into square images (in most cases I simply cropped out a square portion of the longer image).   After I had made over 800 12x12" square inkjet prints, and collected them in published in twelve blog projects called Books, I realized I needed to organize the work into conceptual-thematic frameworks that had recurred throughout my work including those that had been informing my work for many years preceding my creation of (this) Photography Blog (which I had initiated in late 2010) plus all the blog projects I have sine then published.  The many thematic collections, which I call 12x12" PROJECTS, have grown in number to over two dozen projects.

One of the most fascinating revelations provided by the 12x12" Inkjet Print Books & Projects was seeing how so many of my favorite images appeared and meant different things to me when placed in so many of the different thematic PROJECTS.

When the 12x12" Books and Projects seemed to have come to an end-point, I moved on to the inevitable problem of print scale (print image size) and format (the square vs. the long, horizontal rectangle).  I will write about these issues further below.


     *     
________________________


A little History regarding 
The Works that preceded the 12x12" Inkjet Print Project

In 2022, before the idea of an Inkjet Print Project had crystalized and I began working on the 12x12" Inkjet Print Books & PROJECTS, I had felt a strong need to make a collection of inkjet prints of selected images from my 18 Pandemic Inspired blog projects.  About a third of the way into making the prints for the project I ran into several problems: first with the inks for my old Epson printer; then in the middle of the project my poor old Epson 7600 printer died.  

I became strongly committed to getting the project completed and decided to order a new Epson 6000P printer in January, 2023.  But before I could get my new printer and set it up, I had to have my two cataract surgeries (which had been previously scheduled for mid and late January 2023) and shortly after the surgeries I experienced retinal tears in each eye, which stalled my printing project yet again.  After five surgeries I found a way of printing despite my healing eye issues.  I explain all this in more detail in my Pandemic Inkjet Print blog project: 

Twenty-five photographs, printed 16x20"on 20x24"paper  

This Pandemic inspired project (published on my blog June, 2023) had helped motivate me to initiate three other inkjet print projects which were made at about the same time in 2023 (the titles and links are immediately below), and in 2024 I made a 12x12" Project inspired by the Pandemic.

Blue Angels  
(A Photography Project about Death, Angels & the Blue Pearl (the blog version was revised April 2023) 
Inkjet prints made in 2023 (image sizes vary from 16x20" to 18x21") 

Silent Dialogues
18x18" images on 20x24" paper Inkjet prints made in 2023

Double-page Illuminations for An Imaginary Book
18x21" images on 20"x 24" paper Inkjet prints made in February, 2024 



________________________

*     *     *     *     *     *     *
________________________



The 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECTS and Books
The 16x20" Inkjet Prints on 20x24" paper

The 2026 Inkjet Print Digital Archive Project March 2026


I have already mentioned how the 12x12" Inject Prints project grew to unexpected proportions and now consists of Twelve Books and over two dozen Thematic Projects. I have dedicated a blog page, complete with an introduction, to the 12x12" project which includes links to each of the 12x12" Books and Projects. Book One of the 12x12" project, begun in May, 2023 and revised several times, includes a lengthy introduction providing a more complete context to how the Inkjet Print Project in all its complexity came into being.

*     *     *

The idea of the 12x12" formant grew out of a seven year project entitled The 1994-2000 Studies Project.   I love the square format for its ability to concentrate my vision in a straight-forward and often centered way. I had made many silver-gelatin print projects in which I used a square format camera. But especially when I changed totally over to digital photography, I made digital files that were similar to the 35mm format which I used so often when working in film and making gelatin prints. After I completed the The 1994-2000 Studies Project which involved miniaturize square photographs made form all kinds of different formatted negatives, I became comfortable and then eventually loved making square images using as a starting point the 4:3 format on my digital camera and then cropping the images down to a square. 

But of course not all of the images I have made could be successfully transformed from a 4:3 ratio to the square. Indeed many of my Meadow Series photographs, for example, refused to work as square images so I created the 16x20" Inkjet Print Project especially for the Meadow photographs that didn't work as square images. On the other hand, to my surprise, many of the Meadow images worked quite well as squares, and both truly benefitted from a larger sized image size. The 18x18" Inkjet Print Project and the 21x21" Inkjet Print Project were the most recently created projects for those images that seemed to need the larger scale as print images. It was my favorite size, and worked so well for both the straight photographs and the symmetrical photographs I end up with 250 images on the 18x18" blog page. It was an overwhelming display of images with many different conceptual and thematic ideas displayed all together that in August 2025 I felt it necessary to change the way I presented the works as a blog project. Now, as you may have already seen, the 250 prints have been presented under twelve separate titled blog pages (visit the Revised 18x18" Inkjet Print Project).

I had began making the meadow photographs in 2010 shortly after my wife Gloria and I moved to Canandaigua, NY in 2008 (after my retirement from teaching at UW-Milwaukee). The Meadow was one of my earliest projects I published on my blog (which I initiated in November, 2010). All of the meadow images published in that original blog project were presented in their long rectangular format. Later, after working through many of the 12x12" inkjet print Books and Projects, I felt inspired to try printing some of the meadow images as square photographs and was thrilled with the results.

A similar thing happened with my Symmetrical Photographs. They were originally presented on my blog as longer formatted images, mostly because the images I used for the symmetrical constructions were in the 4:3 format. But I had always thought of the symmetrical images as essentially "round" or "circular" images. Finally, I realized there was no reason not to transform the original version of the symmetrical images into square inkjet prints, and in the two larger sizes: both 18x18" and 21x21" images.

Many of the 12x12" prints are perfect in the size and format they are in. However, in the last several months of 2024 I have been having a wonderful time making larger sized prints of some of my most favorite images that seemed ineffective in the smaller 12x12" format. The larger scale prints have yielded some very power revealing images in their different various large sized formats, 16x20" and the square 18x18" and 21x21" formats. I have organized the newly made larger prints according to image size and image format, as you will see below.

In late 2024 and early 2025 through August 2025 I have produced some very good new work and have focused my energy on making more and more of the LARGER prints. There have been many images which have truly benefitted from the larger print scale which--by the way--includes the tonal matte that surrounds the actual image itself. The tonal surrounding matts (they vary in width depending on the image) are an integral part of the image in all of the 12x12" 16x20" and 21x21" print sizes.

The Inkjet Print Project Blog links provide an online document, or visual Archive, of every inkjet printed image I have made in all the various sizes and formats.

New 2026 The 2026 Inkjet Print Archive Project March 2026 This project will not be announced and placed on my blog's Welcome Page, but it does contain images I have liked well enough to print (in varying sizes from 12x12" 15x15" 16x20" 18x18" so far) and have not yet found a conceptual or subject matter HOME for them within my creative process. In this way, the printed works you will see in the above blog link have been included in my Inkjet Print Digital Archive and my Inkjet Print Archive -- just not placed in a published blog project.

Note: after this Inkjet Print Archive Project was published 
and announced on my blog's Welcome Page in 
March 2026;  I revised it several times . . .  

Then in June, 2026 I initiated a series of "mini" Inkjet Print Projects listed
immediately below) which--as of September 2026--consists of Eight 
"mini" projects, most of which include commentary on the images.
I expect more to follow.

*     *   *

Regarding viewing my blog published images:
There is in varying degrees a difference between the actual print I have made and the way it looks published in my blow.  I am very concerned that you see my blog images in the highest quality reproductions possible on your computer.  If you are viewing my blog projects on a Desktop or Laptop computer I encourage you to look over the following statement below--which I have included in most of my blog projects over the last two years:  

A brief note about "How to Best View My Online Blog Images" 
If you are viewing this project on a desktop computer or a laptop, I encourage you to read my blog explanation regarding How to Best View My Online Blog Images.  In brief, click on an image once, then once again; this will (hopefully) enlarge the image and present it in a dark tonal environment at its maximum viewing quality in terms of image sharpness, luminance, tonal gradations, etc.  Once you have entered this alternate viewing space you can then use your zoom-in & zoom-out keyboard or menu options to adjust the image size to your screen, and you can darken or lighten your computer's screen brightness to suit your equipment and viewing preferences. 
 


Additional Related Blog Project Links
     
The Complete Collections of Theme-Related Blog Projects
The 1994-2000 Studies Project



Please visit the Welcome Page to my blog The Departing Landscape.  It includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating from the most recent to those dating back to the 1960's.  You will also find on the Welcome Page my several Introductory statements, my resume, contact information . . . and much more.




Updated September 10, 2026


















Posted by Steven D. Foster at 10:30 AM
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