The Online Photographer

[From Ctein:]

Starting on Friday, May 30, and running for one week, Mike and I will be having a massive dye transfer TOP sale. Every dye transfer print I have remaining in my inventory, regardless of size and rarity, will be on sale for $690. (Or less—see below!) That's only modestly higher than my "TOP dye transfer sale" price six years ago and it's a very small fraction of my current prices. [And it's very inexpensive for large dye transfers, even twenty years ago. —Mike the Ed.]

This is different and more complex than most TOP sales.

Does this mean I've started printing dye transfer again? No, absolutely not. Even if I changed my mind and acquired supplies, I've sold half of the matrix sets and work prints. I couldn't print those pictures again even if I did still have a darkroom.

Still, I have a substantial inventory from throughout my career as a fine-art photographer and master dye transfer printmaker. Dye transfer printing, one of the most difficult photographic printing methods in the history of the medium, was sufficiently time-consuming, especially nailing the first print right, that when I did make one that satisfied me I'd make several additional prints, because those duplicate prints were relatively quick to make (emphasis on "relatively"). Whenever a particular picture got close to selling out, I'd schedule a reprinting session and make a new set of inventory prints.

Consequently, at any given time I would average three prints of a particular photograph in inventory. Sometimes there's only one print remaining, sometimes several.

Altogether, though, there are a lot of prints—and all of them are going up for sale.

Okay, why? In part because I'm a huge fan of these sales and have been ever since Mike came up with the idea back when he was Editor of Photo Techniques magazine. The idea of being able to get these rare prints into your home for a fraction of what you would normally have to pay really appeals to me. I like the idea of people owning my work, and the more people the better. I'd rather sell a lot of prints for less money than fewer prints at higher prices.

But, why now? Because, as you may know, I am emigrating to Ireland. The more money I can bring in to pay for this expensive undertaking, the better off I'll be. Furthermore, it is almost certain that I will not be able to bring those inventory prints with me without paying a duty. The "market value" of this work is huge. My normal rate of sales is low. The economic math simply doesn't favor it.

(Apropos of which, I am looking for someone in the US to handle the shipping and handling of any sales I do make, post-departure. The work load would be low, the pay excellent, and you'd incur no liability if any prints got lost or damaged. 'Cuz, y'know, life happens. Please email me if you think you're interested and up to the task of storing many boxes of prints and exactly following my precise instructions for S&H.)

All right, enough preliminaries...

How it's going to go
To begin with, you can start thinking about what you'd like to buy right now. I've built a webpage ( https://ctein.com/dyesale.htm ) that shows everything in my inventory, organized by category, with size and number of remaining prints listed. I will try to keep this page updated over the course of the sale.

You can order as many prints as you like and I'm offering incentives for multiple-print purchases. It'll be $690 each for the first and second prints ordered, plus a flat $50 shipping and handling charge, regardless of the number of prints ordered or where they're being shipped to.

If you choose to buy more than two prints, each additional print will be half price—$345! There is no limit to the number of prints you can buy (subject to availability—I'm coming to that). "Gaming" the pricing system is fine by me—if you and some friends want to combine your orders to get the discount, I'm down with that. Just so long as everything comes to me in one order and is being shipped to one address.

On top of that, I will pay the sales tax for orders in California (it will simplify the ordering process).

Starting on Friday, you can email me your choices, with the title(s) of your print choices (and size, if it's available in more than one size). Do NOT send me any money until I confirm your order. I would prefer that US customers pay with a personal check drawn on US funds. Those without access to US funds can use PayPal. No, I'm not set up to take Venmo or any of the other alternative pay systems, sorry.

Fairness to all
What happens if more people want a particular photograph than I have prints of? Because that's going to happen. Some of my photos are way more popular than others. Here's where it gets interesting.

It'll be a quasi-first-come, first-served sale, the same as we used in my previous inventory sales, and it works like this:

Please give me up to three alternate, ranked choices that you would be happy with. You don't have to give me any alternates if there's only one photograph you really want (but it won't improve your chances of getting what you do want). What I'll do each day is optimize all those preferences across all that day's orders to maximize the number of people who will get one of their choices. This works better than you might think. In previous sales that were set up this way, 98% of our buyers got what they requested.

Don't try to game this by choosing only one photograph, if there is indeed more than one you’d be happy with. The demand for my work is very non-uniform, so the odds are that the one you want is more likely to be wanted by others. If you don't give me any alternatives, there's an increased chance that you won't get anything.

Each day I will optimize among the orders I got for that day, confirm the orders with the prospective buyers, and arrange with you for payment. I'll also try to update the webpage showing the offerings each day, so fewer people will be frustrated by ordering something that's already unavailable (inevitably that will happen, because it's not a real-time system).

I won't be giving any preference to the time of ordering within a single day, but I'll complete one day's optimization and allocate those prints before going on to the next day's orders. In other words, a daily first-come-first-served queue, so ordering on an earlier day will improve your chances of getting what you want.

Start making your list now (and checking it twice...but honestly I won't care if you're naughty or nice).

Life's work
Dye transfer is insanely difficult and mastering it was a large part of my life's work as a photographer. Mike and I have harped over the years about the wide gulf between seeing original prints and seeing only small online JPEGs. That's especially true of generously large dyes. My hope is that this sale will help these inimitable fine and rare prints to find exceptionally good homes, among people who love photography. I hope your original dye will become a prized possession, a conversation piece, and a source of enjoyment for you for years to come. And, come October, I'll be off to Ireland!

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Stephen F Faust: "I've been kicking myself ever since I, for some unknown reason, decided not to participate in Ctein's last dye transfer print sale. I'm not missing this one—I'll be primed and ready Friday morning. Thanks Mike and Ctein for another opportunity!"

Mike replies: I know how you feel. My particular reaction to this is that I'm going to get mine framed. Mine is this one, which I used for a particularly attractive cover of Photo Techniques.

Peter Turnley is the Turnley with all the history here on TOP. He has provided information, friendship and advice, written posts, presented portfolios, met many of our readers in his photography workshops, sold his beautiful hand-signed prints at very accessible prices, and more. Peter also has a long history of collaboration with David Turnley, another former world-class photojournalist. They have an even longer history together as identical twin brothers.

And, like Peter, whose sale ended last night, David and his wife Rachel are also having a holiday sale, but of David's pictures of course.

I don't know what else to say except go look at the pictures and see what you think. Which is your favorite? Maybe one of them will be right for your wall, your collection, or as a gift. The sale ends on the 10th. Please tell David and Rachel I said hello!

Mike
(Photos © David Turnley 2024)

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Rick in CO: "In awe of both brothers' work, especially since I am inept at their style of photojournalism. I came across David Turnley on a street corner in the Marais district of Paris. I was out early in the morning to pick up a couple of croissants for breakfast, and there he was, standing, looking for photo ops. Tough to miss him, with a Leica hanging from his neck. I asked if he was Peter Turnley...whose work I was, at that time, more familiar with, having his book French Kiss. David was very gracious to inform me that he was the other twin, and we had a pleasant but too brief conversation.

"I remain a bit abashed that I did not make a more general inquiry of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and ask if he was one of the Turnleys. Still, he was very nice, and out looking for photos while I was just interested in getting breakfast! That is a work ethic."

Thomas Paris: "Last I was there (a couple of weeks ago?), some of David's photos were being shown at the Paris City Hall (Hôtel de Ville). They're probably still there."

Photo by David Turnley

I've almost missed the Turnley sales for this year, dang it. Negligence.

Peter's is over, but you still have a few days left to catch David's. Pay the pictures a visit. (Disclosure, if you say I sent you, David and Rachel kindly share a bit with me.)

As an exercise in delectation, even if you aren't going to buy one, which one would you choose if you were buying? I think my choice would be Print #25 this year. Last year (unless it was longer ago than that) it was Print #16.

Nelson Mandela by David Turnley

Amazing that two brothers can both be so talented. And have such similar concerns. Although they are identical twins, so maybe it makes sense. Mysteries of the Universe. Surely they have been influences on each other.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

[Sale ended 11/25/2022 at one minute to midnight]

I'm very pleased to offer for sale a small selection of fine prints made from a monochrome digital camera. The camera is a Sigma fp converted to monochrome by having the CFA (color filter array) stripped from the camera, a service that can be performed on any camera that has a Sony sensor by Daniel Morrison at Monochrome Imaging Services in Vancouver, Washington (among others). It is a 24-megapixel full-frame camera. The conversion increases both sensitivity and sharpness such that the prints look more like they were made with a 36-MP camera.

The prints are gorgeous. I'm so pleased with the way they turned out that I've decided to commit to working this way into the future. I've loved black-and-white since I first discovered, as a boy, that the local pharmacy would make black-and-white prints to special order. I drove their technician crazy! Not long afterward, I set up my first B&W darkroom in the bathroom under the basement stairs in my parents' house in Bethesda. My love of B&W continued through a career as a custom B&W printmaker for galleries and museums, and as a darkroom expert writing for such magazines as Darkroom Photography (US) and Black & White Photography (UK) among others. When I first started the "Collector Print Program" at Photo Techniques magazine several decades ago, the idea was to offer beautiful pictures that were also outstanding examples of various specialized, exotic, or unusual photographic techniques, so readers could see for themselves what good examples of those techniques look like. These monochrome-sensor prints follow fully in that tradition.

After the Rain, Keuka Lake, from Hammondsport
["Lake" on the ordering page]

Vultures Eating the Remains of a Deer
["Vultures"]

Car Coming
["Car"]

These prints were made under my supervision in Daly City, California, by Ctein (it's his only name—he's mononymous—and it's pronounced "kuh-TINE). Ctein is a longtime custom printer who transitioned to inkjet printing from dye transfer; he wrote the standard textbook on photo restoration, and we hope he will write one on inkjet printing. He certainly could. They were printed with Epson UltraChrome HD pigment inks on Epson Exhibition Fiber paper. The prints are BIG—for me—printed on 17x22" paper with approximately 1" borders.

The cost is $265 per print, and SHIPPING IS FREE TO ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Your satisfaction is guaranteed—if, after seeing it, you choose not to keep it for any reason or for no reason, simply return it for a full refund. We will accommodate your wishes.

For those who order two prints in any combination, there is a choice of one of two free 8.5x11-inch bonus prints...

Corn at the Harvest
["Corn"]

Wet Asphalt
["Asphalt"]

...and anyone who orders three large prints in any combination will receive both free bonus prints.

The sale is not limited in number; it is LIMITED IN TIME. We take orders only through Friday, all the way to midnight. If you have any questions, please contact Ctein or myself or leave your question in the Comments.

Please click through from the sales page to the large JPEGs that Ctein has put up. They will give you a better idea of what the prints look like. There is a big difference between seeing these little JPEGs and the magnificent full-sized prints. Hopefully, these will help convince you, as they have convinced my grateful self, that monochrome, a.k.a. black and white, is still alive and well, easier than it used to be, and as beautiful as it ever was.

Mike
(Top photo by Dan Whicker)

Featured Comments from:

Nikhil Ramkarran: "Ordered, with great pleasure."

robert e: "They may be just JPEGs, but I can see why you're jazzed, Mike! Boy, the more I see of 'Vultures' the more I like it—there's so much visual variety and many points of interest, but all within a harmonious whole. Congratulations on all these prints and on finally obtaining your dream tool. Good luck with the sale!"

Mike replies: Thank you.

Stan B.: "That's one handsome set of prints!"

Mike replies: Thank you!

Darlene: "I ordered 'Vultures' because I like the image. I call it Circle of Life (or something like that). It is a beautiful image, and I cannot wait to see the print. Happy early holidays to you, Mike."

Mike replies: And to you as well.

Rodolfo Canet Castelló: "Well, I've just ordered my first fine art print! There's a first for everything. I liked 'Lake' the very moment I saw it, and I believe having a master-printed copy will be extremely useful to educate my eye for my own printing. During these years The Online Photographer has been very important to let me escape from the oversharpened, oversaturated amateur photography of today and this should take my education to the next level. Thanks Mike and Ctein!"

Mike replies: It's a good reason to keep a collection of prints or even clips. When I was a custom exhibition printer, specializing in B&W, I kept a large folder of examples of excellent B&W close at hand—some were original prints by others, some were my prints, and some were tearsheets from magazines. The purpose was to "calibrate my eye" before a printing session. I used it infrequently, but I could usually sense when I needed to do so. Five or ten minutes of looking through those examples and I would feel grounded and be ready to start tackling the negatives I had to print that day. (I probably also used that time to formulate a mental plan as to how I wanted to approach that day's negatives.)

That last post took a looong time to write. See what I do for you?

Further announcements about the upcoming print sale, about which I am very stoked:

F It will start at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (Ctein-time) on this coming Monday, November 21st.

F There are three prints, made on 17x22-inch Epson Exhibition Fiber paper with at least a 1-inch border.

F There are also two bonus prints, of this image and this image, made on 8.5x11-inch paper. Anyone who buys two large prints can choose one bonus print, and anyone who buys three prints will receive both. The bonus prints aren't available separately.

F The prints are made on an Epson P800 using Epson UltraChrome HD pigment inks.

F We've noticed that a lot of our customers are repeat buyers, so Ctein would like regulars to know that this time, he will respond to order emails within 48 hours rather than 24, although it might be much sooner than that, and the prints will ship in 45 days rather than 30, although, again, it may be much sooner. The reason for the latter is that we had a few unavoidable delays caused by COVID-related issues during the last sale, and Ctein would like to build in an abundance of caution this time.

F There's one exception: if you need your prints as Christmas gifts, you need only mention that in your order email, and he will make sure you get them on time.

F The sale runs for four days, ending on Friday just before midnight Pacific Time. That's it!

I take tomorrow off, not because I don't like you but because housework. So I'll be back on Sunday. Please put Monday at 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. in London) on your calendar. If you're in Sydney you can be excused for waiting a few hours, because for you the sale starts at 5 a.m. Tuesday! I guess you can sleep in if you have to.  :-)

Kind regards,

Mike

I'm pleased (very) to relate that the upcoming Monochrome Sensor Print Sale is now hard-scheduled. It will commence on November 21st and last for four days only.

If you're unfamiliar with our sales, what we do is to prepare the picture(s) for printing so we know for sure what we have, then open a brief window for pre-orders. After the window closes and all the orders are in, we can make the prints in one or two runs, saving greatly on the time, hassle, and hence the cost of the old-fashioned "gallery model" of sales. It's a win-win: customers get a fine custom print more inexpensively than a bricks-'n'-mortar gallery could sell it for, but the photographer and printer both get paid well too. We've sold thousands of prints over the years following this model, with a great many happy customers. I know because people send me pictures of the prints framed and hung on their walls! One particular joy is all the people, and couples, who have bought original art for the very first time in one of our sales. There have been many of them, too, over the years.

The downside is that you have to order during the order window to get a print at this extraordinarily low price. Once it closes, that's it—lost your chance.

More information to come on Friday. All the information, plus instructions on how to order, will be repeated in the main announcement on Monday the 21st of this month. That's the day you'll be able to see the final selection of pictures. The sale will then close at 11:59 p.m., Pacific Standard Time, on "Black Friday."

Please come back on Monday to see the images and read more about them. The full-range B&W prints are gorgeous. To say I'm extremely pleased with them, and with the potential of the converted monochrome sensor, is honestly an understatement.

Mike

Well this should be great fun for a Sunday!

Ctein and I have agreed in principle on having a print sale of the Sigma fp-M test shots, so you can see for yourself what prints from a full-frame sensor converted to monochrome look like.

Car Coming

They will be rather large—what Ctein considers full size for his own work, on premium 17x22" paper with generous borders. There will be three, plus a premium. One of the prints will be "Car Coming," which you can see here. Another will be an 8x10 of "Wet Asphalt," which will be a free premium for anyone who orders the set of three.

But what should the other two be? Here's the folder.

I have a few more to upload, which I'll do this week, but nothing special enough to think it would be a pick.

Some history
I started this idea way back in the '90s at Photo Techniques magazine, as the "Collector Print" series. The idea was to give people excellent examples of various techniques, so people could see for themselves what the techniques looked like. One of the earliest sales at PT was of prints made from the first affordable digital camera, the Canon D30 (no, not the 30D!), a 3-MP(!) digital SLR that cost "only" $3,000. It was the Canon of the Millennium, announced in very early 2000, and people were very excited about the possibilities it offered going on 23 years ago now. Those prints were by a Canadian fellow named Michael Reichmann, who later became famous as "MR" of The Luminous-Landscape, one of the most important enthusiast websites of digital's early years. I'm sure many of you remember him with fondness, as do I.

Over the years we offered a great variety of prints: examples of true darkroom unsharp masking (it took a whole day just to make the mask); Cibachromes; real dye transfers; Peter Turnley prints made by Voja Mitrovic, the master printer who at one time made all of Henri Cartier-Bresson's and Josef Koudelka's and Sebastiao Salgado's prints; contact prints from large- and ultra-large-format negatives on true contact printing paper; real platinum-palladium prints; a super-large print made with the medium-format digital Leica S; the "father and son" diptychs by Paul and John Paul Caponigro, the former a master of older traditional techniques and the latter one of the very earliest artists to commit to digital means and methods, long before most others did; and many more. Even, most lately, prints from iPhone pictures, of all things. Apart from being technical examples, many of the prints we offered in the past were beautiful and unique in their own right.

As we always try to do if we can, we'll ship to anywhere in the world and all the shipping will be the same (reasonable) price. So as not to exclude anyone on account of logistics.

There's a lot of preparation that goes into a print offer, and we're just getting started. I just asked him yesterday and heard back from him this morning. But you'll be kept apprised as we make progress.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Annie Leibovitz. At long last, the unlimited trade edition of the humongous, limited Sumo edition by Taschen. Mind you, this is still a huge book—15.4 inches high, 556 pages, and almost 13 pounds. And the price! (But that's nothing—the Sumo weighed 57 pounds and cost $7,500.) This is the closest ordinary folks (with ordinary shelves) will get to the ultimate Annie.

The book link above is a portal to any purchase at Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Drake: "Hi Mike I initially quite liked the image 'Corn at Harvest' for its simplicity of subject and tonal range, but it doesn’t really have lasting appeal. I think I would go for 'Vultures Eating' (though it’s unfortunate that a vulture is flying out of the frame—though it does add some tension to the image perhaps?), as the drama and tonal range of the scene is fantastic! Or the 'Rain Across the Valley,' as the lighting is beautiful especially on the foreground corn."

Geoff Wittig: "Thanks, Mike! I have been slowly accumulating a small but lovely collection of photographic prints spanning the range of available printing technologies, including platinum/Palladium and dye transfer, almost all courtesy of TOP and for very reasonable prices. We have you to thank for this opportunity. I'm a landscape guy, but I'd have to cast my vote for 'Interior.' The palpable sense of space and light is wonderful."