LODIMA FINE ART™
SILVER CHLORIDE PHOTOGRAPHIC PAPER
MANUFACTURED and AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE

Purchase Online ( US only at this time, out of country, please contact us. )

It is with great pleasure that we announce to the global photography community that Lodima Fine Art™ silver chloride photographic paper has been manufactured and is now available for purchase.

Shortly after we learned that Kodak was discontinuing the manufacturing of Azo, we realized that our extensive experience with Azo allowed us to be in a unique position to search for a suitable replacement. Although our working schedule was as full as it always is, we carved out considerable blocks of time toward this uncertain objective.

In retrospect, we did not fully appreciate how challenging this process would become given the industry consolidation that was taking place, the unique requirements of a silver chloride emulsion versus that of a silver bromide emulsion, the demise of the U.S. dollar and the appreciation of the Euro, the requirement to formulate a new “modern” silver chloride emulsion from scratch, and the challenges of finding a suitable manufacturing facility that was willing to produce this product to our extremely demanding standards. In the process, more than two years of hard work, a great deal of money, and relentless optimism have brought us to this point where we can introduce Lodima Fine Art™ into the market for everyone to use and enjoy—the goal that many industry professionals had told us would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

To evaluate Lodima Fine Art™ silver chloride paper we visually compared, very carefully, a print made on it from a negative that was originally printed on Azo in 1994. View Scans. This 8x10 negative of Michael’s was chosen because prints from it exhibit a particularly fine and complete range of tonalities from black to white with many levels of midtones. As we evaluated several of the early silver chloride paper samples made for us, we found a number of undesirable properties including excessive contrast, improper paper speed, and poor print color. After repeated transmissions of our feedback to the photographic paper emulsion chemists, the manufacturer was able to make all of the proper corrections. This happened in many stages over an extended period of time.

Here are the details about Lodima Fine Art™ so that everyone can understand the product specifications, the quality standards from a performance perspective, the initial test run, the timing for pre-sales, when the full production run will be manufactured and available, and the product costs.

We feel that this paper is as good as, if not superior to, the Kodak Azo paper that it has replaced. The print color of Lodima Fine Art™ is excellent; it is slightly warm. The printing speed is only slightly slower than Azo, and most important, the tonal characteristics are excellent. This is a long-scale paper with very rich blacks that have a D-Max even higher than the D-Max of Azo. On the Azo print, the D-Max of the dark part in the area above the figure is 2.08. On the Lodima Fine Art™ test print the D-Max is an astounding 2.26. The midtones of Lodima Fine Art™ have slightly greater contrast than those on Grade 2 Azo, lending a brilliance to prints made with this paper. The developing time for Lodima Fine Art™ is the same as it was for Azo—one minute in our Amidol formula. Last, the paper reacted to Rapid Selenium Toner exactly like Azo.

Accelerated aging tests by the manufacturer were made on Lodima Fine Art™ and the results were excellent. No deterioration of the paper could be found.

A manufacturing test run of Lodima Fine Art™ will be completed in the next few weeks that will produce 290 boxes of 100 sheets of 8x10 Grade 2 double weight glossy surface silver chloride photographic paper.

We expect the production run of the paper to be in early 2009 and we will offer a variety of sizes in both Grade 2 and Grade 3 to accommodate as many photographers as possible.

Sizes of paper: We will have the paper made in the following sizes: 8x10, 11x14, 8x20, 20x24—double weight. Special orders will be possible. At this time we are not sure, however, of the quantity that will be required for a special order, but it will tend to be a large amount. Small quantities of special sizes can also be made, but that would require substantial additional cost per box. If the special order is sufficiently large, there may be no higher per-square-inch cost than for our standard sizes.

Our website will serve as the reference point for further details and questions that customers may have concerning Lodima Fine Art™. 

All information currently on the Azo Forum will remain on the Lodima Fine Art™ Forum. There is such a wealth of information there that we feel strongly it should remain available to everyone. The only change in the Forum is the name, and a new category added specifically for discussion about Lodima Fine Art™ paper.

We are now accepting advance orders for this manufacturing test run of Lodima Fine Art™. Each photographer will be allowed to purchase only one box of this paper from this first run. The reason we are limiting this to one box per order is that we want as many photographers as possible to have access to Lodima Fine Art™ photographic paper so that they can become acquainted with its marvelous printing characteristics in anticipation of the larger full production run. At this time, the manufacturer cannot give an exact date when the full production run will happen, but it is expected to be early in 2009.

We need your passion and support for Lodima Fine Art™ to make this marvelous photographic paper a success. Your support in responding to the test run and printing with Lodima Fine Art™ is the first step in the process. Once you have had the opportunity to use this paper we need your financial commitment to Lodima Fine Art™ so that we can complete the production run and insure that this product continues to find a niche in the current global market. Last, we ask you to spread the word to other photographers both in the U.S. and abroad that could use Lodima Fine Art™. The success of this product is dependent upon all of us who are passionate about having access to a high quality silver chloride printing paper.

We had announced earlier that we would keep the price of Lodima Fine Art™ the same as it was for Kodak Azo. Unfortunately, this has proved to be impossible for a number of reasons. One is the increased cost of materials as commodity prices have risen dramatically in the past few years. Another, and perhaps the most obvious, is that the Euro has risen considerably against the U.S. dollar, making the paper, which is being manufactured in Europe, much more expensive than it would have been were we able to get it several years ago. From here on, if the Euro continues to rise against the U.S. dollar, we will have to adjust our prices upward. Conversely, if the U.S. dollar rises against the Euro, we will adjust our prices downward.

The current price per 100-sheet box is $139.95 plus $12 shipping via UPS or Priority Mail in the United States. Overseas shipping will be higher. Payment is preferred by check (payable to Smith/Chamlee Photography), although we will accept all major credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover). Orders and payment can be made by phone, by mail, by email, or through e-commerce on our web site store We expect delivery of this paper in October 2008. Credit cards will not be charged and checks will not be deposited until we need to pay for the paper. Place your order now.

We look forward to your participation and thank you for your great patience in this extensive and difficult process.

Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee
(Afterword below)

Naming the Paper

We struggled for a long time to find a name for this new silver chloride paper. Michael was pretty much set on naming it “AMAZO,” a name Paula had come up with in jest. At the end, we knew that if we were successful the paper would be amazing, and the name “AMAZO” gave a nod in homage to AZO.

A close friend, however, who is more business oriented than we are (after all, we are photographers before anything else), suggested that since our publishing company, Lodima Press, is known for having the finest reproduction quality of photographs, and since we believed that our new paper would be capable of yielding the finest quality prints, we should call the paper Lodima. (For those who haven’t realized it, “Lodima” is “Amidol” spelled backwards.)

About Lodima Press

Lodima Press is dedicated to publishing photography books of exceptional quality. We make no compromises. In the same way that we care about making the best possible prints, we care about having the best possible reproductions in our books. Michael started Lodima Press in 1981 to print his first book, Landscapes 1975–1979, which was awarded Le Grand Prix du Livre (Best Photography Book of the Year) at the Arles Festival. At the time, the Swiss publication “Print Letter” commented, “For the first time in the eleven years of the festival a deserving book has won the prize.” Eleven years later, on the occasion of Michael’s twenty-five year retrospective exhibition at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, we printed his book A Visual Journey.

These books were printed in the then state-of-the-art 300-line screen duotone. There followed three books by Paula, including Natural Connections, which was printed in tritone using Gardner Lithograph’s Laser Silver-Lit Tones™—a proprietary method using silver ink as the third color. To this date, there have been no other books printed using this extraordinary technology.

In 2000 we discovered Salto, a small company in Belgium known to provide the finest printing anywhere. Salto prints books in 600-line screen quadtone, setting a new standard in the reproduction of photographs. No other printer in the world is capable of printing such a fine screen. And in 2000, because of the extraordinary reproduction quality that Salto provides, we began publishing books by other photographers, as well as subsequent books of our own.

The most elegant book we have published to date is Edward Weston: Life Work, and in addition to other photographers’ books we are now publishing two book series: The Portfolios of Brett Weston and the Lodima Press Portfolio Books, an ongoing series that includes books by Nicholas Nixon, George Tice, Keith Carter, Linda Connor, Marilyn Bridges, Larry Fink, Paul Caponigro, and Robert Adams, among others. There are certainly more beautiful books, as objects, than our Lodima Press books; some publishers produce very elegant and expensive bindings. Instead, we spend our limited resources on getting the highest quality reproductions.

Full information about all of our books can be found at http://www.lodimapress.com. Take a look.