Dan's First Digital Negative
How The First Digital Negatives Came to Be
In 1992, Dan found a way to make a digital negative that could be used in the photographic darkroom to create his platinum palladium prints. This 3 min story tells how a visit to a friend’s new business turned into the inspiration for the first digital negatives. Today, photographers use digital negatives in all kinds of alternative photography processes including platinum, cyanotype, salt, Van Dyke and more. Here’s how digital negatives were made over thirty years ago in the early days of merging the power of the computer with classic photographic processes.
I was working for Duane Henry at CopyGraphics in the mid-90's and got a call from this enthusiastic fellow at the Santa Fe Photo Workshops who straight up asked me if I made negatives. I said yes. How are you planning to use them? That call lit a whole new life for our Agfa imagesetter. We had to think outside the box. Shoot, we had to throw out the box and discover a whole new world. Thanks for the call, Dan.
Oh my gosh! Yes SyQuest cartridges are absolutely a blast from the past!