Click here for a comparison of our two print processes.

To produce the highest quality negative or transparency, Vern uses a 4" x 5" Calumet View Camera. Under the focusing cloth of the large format camera, the artist views the image upside down and backwards and attempts to balance the variables of light, mood, and color at the time of the exposure. The exposure time ranges from a brief 1/4 of a second up to 10 minutes.

Vern produces the majority of his prints with a 150mm Schneider APO lens. The lens provides less central and peripheral vision than the human eye but presents what is actually seen, without exaggerated distortion or magnification. Vern also uses 90mm, 135mm, 180mm and 300mm Caltar II lenses in his work. Vericolor Pro 100 and Velvia films offer an accurate response to both daylight and artificial light conditions, which makes Vern less dependent on the use of color filters.

PRINTMAKING

For more than twenty years Vern has practiced and perfected the exacting fine art of printmaking. Vern is excited to present LightJet 5000 photographic prints. The color fidelity of LightJet prints is far more accurate than any traditionally reproduced images, and LightJet prints hold vibrant color, contrast, depth and sharpness in any size, remaining faithful to Vern's large format originals. Digital scanning and enlarging can reproduce images with such clarity, that every print holds its true photographic values. All devices in the system are profiled individually and integrated into a closed-loop color management system using custom ICC profiles for the scanner, the monitor, and each RGB printer.

The process begins with a Heidelberg Tango 300mb scan of Vern’s original 4”x5” transparencies. Using his digital workstation, Vern composes a unique CD master image file for every print and special care is taken to reproduce only what the lens captured, without enhancing nature. His exacting effort captures all the subtleties of color, tone and density that were envisioned at the time of exposure. Flaws in transparency handling and scratches can be removed, as well as colorcasts from film processing, however genuine color and subjects are not altered. The state-of-the-art images are exposed on Fuji Crystal Archive photographic paper using the Cymbolic Sciences LightJet 5000 digital enlarger. Fuji Crystal Archive paper images will hold their museum display quality for 70 plus years.

Vern currently creates Fujix Pictrography 4000 prints from the same master image files. These smaller sized prints, up to 12x18 inches, are an affordable and popular option for Vern's fine art images. Fujix Pictrography prints are exposed onto Fuji photographic paper, and are produced by an authentic silver halide photographic process involving exposure by color lasers. These photographs hold their high archival display quality for 20 years. Incredible Fuji innovation, using an even greater resolution (400 DPI) than LightJet (304.8 DPI), has produced the widest color spectrum presently available in the industry.

LightJet and Fuji's advancing technology gives Vern's photographic art striking clarity and enhances the professional significance of his craftsmanship. A master at printmaking, Vern continues to balance the dynamic mood of the creative moment with all the facets in the printmaking process.

DYE TRANSFER PRINTS

Before the age of digital printmaking, Vern specialized in the Dye Transfer process. As recently as the late 1990's, Vern was one of a select group of photographers still working with the dye transfer, a traditional form of printmaking that produced some of the finest photographic prints available at the time. Dye transfer prints offered sharp, life-like images, exceptional color balance, and a subtle but striking depth of color and tone.

Produced entirely by hand, the dye transfer print enabled the printmaker to control the color balance and contrast in every phase of the printmaking process-producing a print truer to the creative intention of the photographer and the actual subject captured in the photograph.

The dye transfer process, pioneered by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1946, begins with the original transparency. Through the use of what are called principal masks, the printmaker reduces the contrast range in the image. Using the original transparency and the principal masks, separation negatives are made to record the primary colors. Highlight masks are then produced to preserve the details in the light areas of the image. Matrices, actual final-image-size pieces of a special gelatin film, are produced from the color separation negatives and highlight masks. Matrices-which will eventually serve as color printers-are soaked in cyan, magenta, or yellow dye, each matrix absorbing dye in proportion to the thickness of the gelatin. The color print is then rolled one matrix at a time, in register, onto a sheet of dye transfer paper. The dye transfers from the matrix film onto the paper, creating the final color print.

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