I would like to personally welcome you to the FotoTechnika Fine Art Imaging website and this, the first installment of John’s Journal (Blah, Blah, Blahg) and by the way, I’m John Howard. My wife Saundra and I founded FotoTechnika back in 1981 (to find out more, read About Us). Several years later on March 9, 1987 when we first opened our doors to the public, we were neophytes in the photo industry. We had taken delivery of our first E6 processor (which is still running today) three days prior to opening and we didn’t install our first color paper processor (a used Sitte Tische EP2 for you fossils out there) until the end of that first week in business. I had been in offset printing sales for the previous five years so I had some contacts in the industry, but we knew next to nothing about running an imaging business and knew even less about trends and new technology in the photofinishing industry. Fortunately Saundra and I both possess exceptional eyes for color and contrast, although Saundra’s eye for detail surpasses anyone I know. (Back then none of us even needed glasses — these days the optometrist next door makes a good living keeping our eyes in good shape). Our natural abilities allowed us to eventually make up for our shortcomings in knowledge. In the early days we would waste tons of paper and chemistry, but the prints that went out of our doors were generally superior to most anything else being produced in our neck of the woods.
In 1990 Brian Wanta joined us and he, too, had exceptional eyes for detail. My color perception edge was in knowing how people and places should look; Brian’s color abilities were for matching colors. This served him especially well when it came to slide duplication (and later would serve him in his ability to meticulously match artists’ paintings). He was a multi-media producer back in those days. He worked with 35mm stage cameras and reel-to-reel tape recorders. He would cut and splice, and layer and double, triple and quadruple expose slide film using litho masks (more jibberish for many of you, but again some of the relics will know of whence I speak) – very tedious and intricate work.
In the early 1990s the industry was all a-buzz about digital capture and output. We would go to the big trade shows in Vegas, New Orleans and Atlanta, but we weren’t very impressed with the digital applications of the time. We could still make better looking prints using all of our tried-and-true optical methods. Then in 1997 we backed into the digital fine art market by accident. I had a friend in the industry (now deceased) who had leased a Colorspan DesignWinder (the DesignWinder was a poor man’s Iris Printer). My friend had purchased it to produce backlit signs for restaurants, but the machine was too labor intensive for him to make money and his health had already started to fail. We took the printer off his hands and on a whim decided to try printing on some Arches fine art paper. The next thing we knew we were becoming digital printmakers.
The DesignWinder produced wonderful prints that had great archival characteristics as long as you didn’t get the print wet or anywhere close to moisture. The way it laid down ink gave the prints photographic quality, but the materials gave them an “artsy” look. It was especially good for reproducing watercolor prints. As time went on we did more research regarding fine art giclées and within a couple of years we owned our first Roland printer (I was taught by my former boss in the offset printing industry to always buy the Cadillac to save headaches down the road). With the Roland, a drum scanner, a new Mac G4 computer and an upgrade to PhotoShop 4 we had officially made our move toward fine art reproduction.
In the meantime Saundra and I kept looking for digital photofinishing equipment that produced true photographic quality prints (Saundra was especially picky about “jaggies” — there go those eyes again). Finally in early 2002 we felt we could make the move to digital on the silver halide side of our business. Noritsu and Fuji were both making digital minilabs whose prints no longer looked digital. In June of 2002 we finally installed a Noritsu 3001 because of its Digital ICE program (which removed surface scratches from C41 films) and its automated 120 film carrier. The Noritsu was an instant success and the profits generated from it allowed us to purchase our Chromira (ZBE’s 30” LED printer) the next year.
I guess the theme to this entry is to say that our evolution in the industry is like the old Orson Wells commercial for Ernest & Julio Gallo Wines – the slogan went “No Wine Before Its Time.” Regarding equipment purchases, our philosophy is to wait until technology achieves “photographic” resolution, then we adapt it to satisfy our desires for quality and our customers’ specific needs. This is what sets us apart from many other digital printmakers. On the photo lab or silver halide side of our business, our resolution isn’t that unusual – our color perception is. But on the digital printmaker side (giclées) our photographic resolution is exceptional because a majority of the printmakers in that industry come from offset printing or sign-making backgrounds. I worked in that industry and I can tell you that the average printer who’s used to looking at 133- and 200-line screens normally isn’t that concerned about resolution because anything an inkjet printer produces looks better (resolution-wise) than an offset screen.
But resolution isn’t the only thing that sets us apart. We have learned over the years that you can’t rely on “the numbers” to produce superior prints. We have had technicians in the industry tell us that they can achieve perfect by-the-numbers prints. In fact, one of our former supplier/technicians asked us the question “What do you want – a technically correct print or a pretty picture?” We didn’t give him the response he wanted when we said “a pretty picture.” If we were to go strictly by printer profiles via modern color management systems, we would have really flat looking, second rate giclées. At FotoTechnika the eyes of our technicians are much more important than all of our analytical devices. If the prints don’t look right, I don’t care what the numbers say, they won’t sell. In our business “commercially acceptable” has never been good enough. I’ll be the first to say that you need the numbers (via densitometers and color spectrometers) to expedite the process, but pretty pictures are what we are all about.
As I have mentioned in other places in this website, our technicians aspire to be artisans. We take our work very seriously (although we still have fun). Sometimes our perception might not be the same as our customers’ in which case we try our best to please them. With giclées we seek absolute matches to the extent that processes and equipment allow. With photographs (which are subjective by nature), in some cases we feel it is our duty to try to educate because we have seen a lot of prints over the years with these eyes and are very confident in our color perception (see our definition on Print Bonding in the Price List Glossary).
And speaking of eyes, mine are getting tired looking at this computer screen – I need to save them for color correcting. I hope that by visiting this website and reading my journal, if you haven’t used our services before, that you might decide to try us. If there is a specific subject you would like to see addressed in a journal entry, shoot me an email at whatithink@fototechnika.com and I’ll try my best to respond to any questions or comments you may have.
Thanks for your interest in FotoTechnika. I hope you’ll be back to visit often.
