Photography has never been more accessible. We can capture, edit and share an image in seconds. Yet I believe one of the oldest photographic processes still has something important to teach us.
My own journey in photography wasn’t exactly a straight line. I was in college studying engineering, and at the time rock climbing was my real outlet. I joined the climbing club and we would travel out to Moab and Utah for spring break. At first, I just wanted to document those trips, but over time, I slowly fell in love with the West.
The more I went out, the less I was climbing and the more I was photographing. Towards my junior or senior year, I took a dedicated photography trip and absolutely fell in love with it. I started working in photojournalism, photographing a lot of sports, and I had just started dabbling in film. Then, one winter morning—it was about five degrees out—I was warming up my truck in the driveway when someone stole my Pelican case, full of all my digital gear. It was awful, but looking back, it was a blessing. I got the insurance check, bought a 4×5, and never shot digital again.
I’ve been shooting almost exclusively film for about eight or nine years now, mostly large format. It’s the tangibility of it that grabs me. I like not having instant feedback. I like the slow process. Because I shoot mostly transparency film, it sets boundaries and limitations. It changes how I see color and reflected light in the shade. With film, there’s a detachment. Sometimes it takes me months to develop a roll, so when I get it back, it’s like reliving the experience again. That separation is something I still value. By the time I see the transparency, I’ve almost forgotten the mechanics of making the image and I’m simply responding to the photograph again. In many ways, it feels like revisiting the landscape for a second time.
The Importance of Physical Prints in the Digital Age
If you wanted to see your photographs 20 or 30 years ago, there was no other option than to print them. Today, most of our work exists only on screens. We scroll through thousands of images, but I think the lack of printing is a real detriment to photographers. You never fully understand your own work until you see it on paper. That’s when you begin to notice tonal relationships, colour and contrast in ways you simply don’t on a screen.
A screen and a print ask you to look at a photograph differently. Screens are wonderful, but you’re still looking at light coming towards you. A print is something physical. It asks you to slow down. It asks you to really look.
Once you start printing, you also begin to understand what you actually want from the photograph, rather than simply accepting what you’ve projected digitally. For me, that’s where the real creative process begins. It’s why I don’t think it’s truly a photograph until it touches paper.
Discovering the Art of Alternative Photography Printing
For a long time, even after I started shooting film, I was using a lab. I didn’t actually do my own printing until I moved to California and bought a 17-inch wide printer. I experimented with papers, but it felt like it was lacking something. I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment—I’d press a button and a perfect print would pop out, and I’d think, “What’s the point?” It was too easy. It didn’t feel like art.
That’s why I dove into alternative processes. Back in 2017 or 2018, a gentleman in Spain reached out to use one of my images for his carbon transfer process. It was something I’d never heard of, but when he sent me the print I just fell in love. I intended to go to Spain to learn from him, but the travel demands of my work kept me grounded. Then, when the world shut down during the pandemic, I finally had time. I transitioned my brain to Spanish time, took a two-week workshop via Zoom, and I was hooked. I ended up buying a building in 2023, and I converted the whole 2,400-square-foot studio around carbon printing. It was a crazy undertaking, but it seems to be working.
What Makes Platinum Palladium So Special?
Platinum palladium and silver gelatin are both ideal processes for first-timers who want to get hands-on in the darkroom. Essentially, platinum palladium is sensitized metal. To get a little technical for a moment, you take typically inert metals—platinum and palladium—and make them ferrous using ferric oxalate. Through ultraviolet light exposure, those atoms react and bond the metals right into the fibers of the paper. This creates a permanent bond, which is a key reason it is considered an exceptionally archival technique.
While silver gelatin is a classic darkroom experience known for its rich, deep blacks, platinum palladium provides an incredible, long tonal scale that is just stunning. It’s relatively fast, too—you can make a print in an hour and a half, whereas carbon might take two weeks. You walk away with something your kids, and their kids’ kids, can hang on the wall. It’s not about diving into something like cyanotype, which is fun but limited; we’ll be creating a stunning, archival piece of fine art.
Combining Digital Workflows with Historic Printing
The workflow is completely hybrid. Most people joining the workshop will photograph digitally, and that’s perfect. We will make a digital negative via an inkjet printer onto transparent paper, and then we’ll contact print it.
Traditionally, in the 1800s, you were limited to the size of your camera negative. Today, digital negatives mean we can produce platinum prints far larger than would ever have been practical in the nineteenth century. I create 40×60 inch platinum prints. You can do any size you want.
This is a rare case where technology has improved a historic process. We can calibrate on screen and produce a print within a couple percentage points of accuracy in the darkroom. It’s truly “what you see is what you get.” You can definitely shoot film and bring it along, but for the digital shooter, this is a way to use modern technology to produce a 19th-century masterpiece.
Choosing the Best Images for Platinum and Silver Printing
When choosing an image for platinum palladium printing, don’t worry too much about the subject itself. What I’m really looking for is tonality and texture. I tend to prefer high-key images. I often use wildlife photographs from Africa as examples—elephants, lions and the like—not because they’re special subjects, but because they naturally have beautiful relative contrast, with rich blacks sitting alongside bright whites. Those are stunning. But that’s just a technical example; you don’t need an elephant for the process to work.
If your image has stark whites and beautiful blacks, it will look amazing. Generally, if it’s a heavy mid-tone image, I might point you toward a different process. But honestly, there are very few images out there that don’t work in platinum if you’re after that specific high-key, high-contrast look.
One of the reasons we’ll also spend time making silver gelatin prints is that the process suits a much broader range of photographs. Images with rich blacks, heavy midtones or subjects that don’t naturally lend themselves to platinum often come alive in silver instead. Seeing the same principles through two different processes is part of the experience.
I’ll have plenty of prints on the walls in the studio, so everyone will get a pretty good idea of what the final print will look like before we even start. We can soft-proof, go through hard proofs, and work into the process so you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get before you get it.
What to Expect from a Hands-On Printing Workshop
If you’ve never stepped into a darkroom, don’t worry. I handle all the technical calibration and you don’t need to know the intricacies of the chemistry, though I’ll certainly teach anyone who wants to know. We’ll spend the first day hand-coating and producing platinum palladium prints before moving into traditional silver gelatin printing on day two. The purpose of the workshop isn’t to teach you how to go home and build your own platinum printing setup. It’s to let you experience the process of making a beautiful print with your own hands.
Since an 8×10 platinum print is a real investment of materials, we generally keep the chemistry and exposure stable. We make our artistic changes in the digital file before we print. I find that process-oriented folks—the doctors, the engineers, the people who love a system—really thrive in this environment. It’s controlled, logical, and deeply satisfying. It isn’t a toxic mess. It’s just chemistry.
I wouldn’t recommend wearing your Louis Vuitton shoes into the lab—my wife gets on at me all the time because I ruin shoes like it’s nobody’s business! But we do have aprons. When you’re coating paper by hand, you’re not just an observer; you’re a participant. That tactile connection is what we reclaim the moment you step into the lab.
Inside the Studio: A Dedicated Lab for Alternative Printing
I originally built the lab around carbon printing, but from the beginning I wanted it to be a place where artists could spend time. It’s about 2,400 square feet. It has a big 20-foot sink, a 10×5 island, and multiple sinks around the area. I wanted an inspirational space, both for me and for the artists I host. There’s a scanning room with my drum scanners—I’m a bit of an engineer, and I love having the precision to maintain total control of the file—but I also have a dry area up front with a couch, chairs, a coffee bar, and a library with photography books that date back to the late 1800s. People usually walk in and just say, “Wow.”
The lab is built to be a workspace. Because I have that background in engineering, I’m constantly tinkering and inventing equipment and methods for printing practices that were developed over a hundred years ago. I wanted a place where I could not only do my own work but where other artists could see the potential of these techniques. Whether you’re scanning high-resolution files or waiting for a print to dry, the space is built to slow you down. It should be social. It’s about sharing ideas, looking at prints, and being in a space that respects the effort it takes to create art.
The Rising Trend: Why Photographers are Rediscovering Handmade Prints
One of the most encouraging things I’ve noticed is that handmade printing is becoming more visible again. Every April I attend The Photography Show presented by AIPAD (the Association of International Photography Art Dealers) in New York, and the change over the last few years has been remarkable. The first year I went, almost everything on display was digital inkjet. There were vintage silver and platinum prints, of course, but very little contemporary work made by hand. This year, I’d estimate around a third of the contemporary prints on display were handmade.
I think it’s because, as landscape photographers progress through their careers, they start asking themselves how to separate their work from everyone else’s. The genre is so heavily explored and so heavily photographed that many people are returning to printing as another way of defining their work. Not necessarily hand-printing, but certainly printing their own photographs. Seeing more contemporary handmade prints at AIPAD tells me that interest is growing rapidly—and that’s exciting, because it suggests more photographers are rediscovering the value of making their own prints.
The Lasting Satisfaction: Why Hand-Printing is Worth the Effort
Digital photography is incredibly accessible, and inkjet printing is just as accessible. But at a certain point, you have to ask: where is the craft? You can travel to new locations, but what if you want to do something more? Right now, everything is left to algorithms and profiles that are just handed to you. It makes you wonder: where is that artistic touch anymore?
That is what we’re reclaiming in the lab. This isn’t about disappearing into a darkroom or becoming an expert in chemistry. It’s a hands-on process—from image to print. I’ll handle the technical side, and if you want to dive deeper, I’m happy to teach you. But that’s not the point. The point is to make a good print, to have that moment where you think, “Oh, cool. I made this.” These historic processes are far more approachable than most people realise, and I hope workshops like this introduce more photographers to a side of the craft they never knew they would enjoy.
Join Michael to hand-make your own monochrome platinum-palladium and silver gelatin prints on our 11/26 Printing Lab: Platinum and Silver Photography workshop in Kansas, USA.
