To kick this project off I arranged to meet Steve Macleod, Creative Director of Metro Imaging. It was Steve who developed the digital silver gelatin paper a number of years ago. Through my meeting with him I learnt a lot about the paper, much of which changed how I thought I would develop the project. I had thought that I would be able to simply use the paper in the darkroom, that I would expose it to a digital image and then take it the darkroom again and run it through chemistry. I was quite wrong!
The paper it turns out, is very unstable and has to be handled and exposed to light in very particular ways. Firstly, normally in the darkroom exposure tend to be quite long. This paper is exposed using lasers, so instead is designed to be exposed to very short and very bright exposures. The laser exposure also means it is sensitive to all colours of light and needs to be handeld in complete darkness, not even under the red safelight of the darkroom. Finally, once the paper has been exposed to light, it continues to react and essentially get darker. All of this altered how I thought I was going to work with the paper and I had to rethink how this work could even be possible.
Eventually I came up with a solution, and with the help of photographer Andrew Bruce I was able to make use of a photo studio close to Metro Imaging that I could use to expose the paper to analogue sources. The plan was to first do some analogue tests with the paper as no one had tried to do this. We didn’t know just how sensitive the paper would be to light so decided on a set up in the studio in which the paper would be held down with magnets on a large low table with a flash positioned above. We would cover the paper and then produce a test strip but moving the card along to reveal more of the paper and each time set off the flash, hopefully creating a gradient of tones so that we knew how much light we would need to reach a fully black tone.
