Platinum Photography

It is of course still possible to do--you can get the chemicals, the cameras, the paper, etc. There are people still doing it. The number is not very large. It's nontrivial expense and labor. The prints are indeed very nice.

>You can’t take a small negative and project it onto the paper, as you do with an enlarger for silver gelatin prints.

Pretty much sums up the point. Using 8x10 or whatever size negatives when film rolls were coming about is a non-starter for the general public.

The cost seems very high as the other commenter has mentioned also. From a quick search purchasing a kit will give you a printing cost of ~$15/photo. This immediately relegates it to the realm of hobbyists with money. Canvas prints of that size may be a bit cheaper for someone seeking something that’s a bit more special than a regular photo.

I found out about carbon prints, still have it as a bucket list item to make one, though they are quite labor intensive.

You can laser print an image (any image!) onto a projector transparency (overhead sheet) and do a contact print that way. Then you take it out into the sun and use that to expose the paper. Contact prints require very little resolution so a laser print (or an inkjet print) is generally fine despite not being that high a PPI.

The "authentic" way would be to create an internegative with an enlarger. You might use reversal-processed B+W film for example (creating a B+W positive), or create an interpositive and then use that to create an internegative (more steps obviously). Either way it's true that the analog process is a bit of a pain, but modern "hybrid" workflows completely remove this.

It's not just platinum prints that have this problem btw. Cyanotype paper is also extremely slow, contact prints are almost always the strategy there too. Given how slow it is, and the particular range of UV-sensitivity it needs, it's difficult to do indoors actually, but fortunately the universe has seen fit to bless us with a large, powerful UV source overhead for around 12 hours per day.

Same for azo paper and some of the other silver papers even... the kodak "postcard cameras" using 122 rollfilm (not 120!) were usually contact-printed and the simplest answer was to do it outdoors. Slow paper is actually easier if you are working outdoors, because it gives a longer working time and exact light levels or split-second timing doesn't matter.

Chemistry was simply much slower in the early days, a "fast film" in the early days was like ISO 8 iirc, and paper was even slower, you had "fractional ISO" in many cases. And a "fast lens" was a rapid rectilinear at f/8. Today we just take it for granted that an exposure is a fraction of a second but that was not at all a common thing in the early days of photography.

The idea of modern cameras with backlit CMOS sensors shooting ISO 256,000 with a f/1.2 lens would have vaporized a medieval peasant instantly. /s

And the idea of internegatives/interpositives has pretty much faded over time too. But this used to be a much more normal part of darkroom work. When you hear the term "unsharp mask" used... that actually comes from the times when it would be a literal mask, an interpositive that you enlarged together with the negative to control edge sharpness.

But yes you are right that analog photography is a rich person's hobby these days... the prices are significantly higher than even when I was doing it 10-15 years ago (which was already into the digital era). Almost all of these processes run on silver or platinum or other organometallic chemistry (with a few exceptions like cyanotypes) and the "metallic" part of that chemistry has climbed hugely in price, on top of sales volumes collapsing. The precious metal prices are why photo stores/etc will often take exhausted fixer for free... there is a commercially significant amount of silver in that bottle, and it all came out of your film/paper!

Contact printing means you have to press the negative against the paper