My Experience With K7 Carbon – Something to Behold

Posted by John Dean on Aug 4, 2011 in Blog, featured, Piezography K7 inks and K7 curves | 0 comments

There have been a lot of advances in pigment inkjet imaging over the last decade. In the realm of monochrome digital photographic printmaking, Jon Cone of Cone Editions in Topsham Vermont has led the way for printmakers like me to discover all the subtleties that this medium has to offer. Jon has created a wide variety of hue sets of Piezography carbon based inks, but the one that I keep coming back to, for both my clients and my personal work is the K7 100% Carbon set. It was formally known as Carbon Sepia. I believe that recently Jon realized that the designation “sepia” was a psychologically limiting description in that these ultra-subtle warm carbon dilutions are in no way related to the bright red-yellow color that one may by habit associate with sepia toning and the like from our darkroom days, thus the updating of the name recently to simply K7 Carbon.

Guest Blogger: John Dean

John has been a working photographer and visual artist since the late 1970’s. His work involves both still life and urban landscape iconography that is often shaped, colorized, and refined in the computer. He has been working with digital imaging since the mid 1990s. John started his imaging business, Dean Imaging, in Atlanta in 2001 to specialize in the expanding area of high stability pigment based digital imaging for the art community. Dean Imaging works with art photographers, painters, and multi-media artists to materialize their creative ideas digitally.

For me these ultra durable inks have a depth and solidity that no other black and white inks I have used can match. I’ve used them for portraits, landscapes, architecture, still life, and just about everything else. K7 has a dimensionality that my other pigment inks can’t duplicate ( no matter how hard I try). As a matter of fact everything else I’ve tried, no matter how nice, look flat in comparison.

This is why I chose these inks in 2008 to print the historic and amazing photographs by Harry Burton, done in 1922 as part of the original discovery and documentation of the most intact Egyptian archaeological find that was ever found, undisturbed for over 3,000 years. I worked from scans of Burton’s original glass plate negatives that were all shot on location at the original tomb in Cairo as Howard Carter found them.

As a printmaker what I needed most was an inkset that would be incredibly delicate in tonal range, glowing, though not fake looking, and having a good dmax while rendering as high of a resolution as I could muster for these glass plate scans that were often shot in difficult conditions, underground, with very long exposures on an 8×10 glass plate. After many tests using several kinds of printers and inks, the perfect combination for me was Piezography Carbon K7 on the Crane Portfolio Rag paper. This gave me the print color and the resolution that I needed in an inkset that is among one of the most permanent, if not the most permanent ever made. Now that this project is well behind me I still have a warm feeling in the back of my mind knowing that these prints will continue to look they way that I made them for decades and centuries to come. As a matter of fact, like a great Rembrant etching, I expect them to last as long as the paper they were printed on, and beyond. Thank goodness for Piezography Carbon, it is in a class all it’s own. My hat’s off to K7 Carbon.

John Dean
Dean Imaging, Atlanta Georgia