“You can’t make a fine print from a coarse negative”. That has been the critical belief of Barry Thornton, well known professional monochrome fine printer and author of ‘Elements’ and ‘Edge of Darkness’. It has become his catch phrase over the years. “If a negative is properly exposed and processed, it is difficult not to make a high quality print”, he asserts from decades of hard experience. That belief just cracked.

The first hairline crack started a couple of years ago with his hybrid digital/traditional method by making digital contact negs with a low priced flatbed scanner from original camera negatives. He used these digital negatives to produce fine prints by conventional wet processing that were significantly better than traditional direct fine print methods – even from less-than-perfect original negs.

Then he moved on to make fully digital prints using mainly Piezography but also M.I.S. and Lyson inks, sometimes mixing one with the other. “It was a revelation”, he says. “I found myself going back over decades of negatives making beautiful prints from negatives that were unusable for conventional fine printing”. And the results were better than the finest traditional print. “The digital process, if properly handled, reproduces the subtlest differentiation in extreme highlights and shadows unachievable with a wet processed print. And it is sharper, even from an economy scanner, with archival qualities that are at least as good. Anybody with a reasonably modern PC – nothing special – can do this”.

“Of course, it took a lot of burning midnight oil to learn the new techniques as they applied specifically to fine monochrome work. It also took a lot of money and wasted materials, inks, software and hardware to find the best methods. It was like starting as a novice all over again”, he says. “But it has been more than worth it”, he adds. “ However, I now have a new catch phrase – ‘You can’t make a fine digital print from a coarse file’ – also learned by hard experience. You need to know how to produce a fine digital file if you are to make quality monochrome digital prints. The techniques are very different from the typical colour print – starting from the type of conventional negative to produce”.

“I know lots of other mono photographers are either making the move to digital, or are thinking about doing so but are nervous about scrapping years of conventional expertise to risk the new. So I set down all the right techniques to make the transition in a simple hands-on short guide book. This will save transitional photographers from the pitfalls and expense of experimenting themselves without having to wade through daunting turgid pages of thick technical Photoshop manuals not devoted to specialist monochrome fine photography.” The new self-published and printed short book is called ‘Elements of Transition’. A4 size, it is printed on thick high quality paper literally packed with clear techniques all fully illustrated. It is perfect bound with a protective transparent plastic cover to take hard handling for reference work. This one book will probably be all you’ll ever need to make – easy to read; easy to understand.

Elements of Transition is only availible from HERE