I’ve been a photographer since 1981. In the 1980s and early 1990s I shot on 35mm and 120 monochrome film and operated a wet-darkroom for film development and printing. CyberHalides burst into life on 8 September 1997, and in its initial form was a means of showcasing scans of those prints. In those early days, photo gallery web sites were not that common – clearly not the case now. The images from the original web site are preserved for posterity in the Ancient History section of this site.
At the time many people involved in photography could readily see that the name CyberHalides was a play on the name of the active light-sensitive compound in traditional film and paper – silver halides. Sadly there are not many photographers who either recognise or remember this any more.
I switched to printing my images using an inkjet printer soon after I moved to digital in the early 2000s. The current CyberHalides site, and its companion site CyberHalides Jazz, principally feature images from the digital era. While I am a little nostalgic about the wet darkroom I have no desire to return. I much prefer the digital process.
Fairly early on in the inkjet era I discovered QuadToneRIP, or QTR, as a better way of printing monochrome images using an Epson inkjet printer. Since around 2007 I have been using QTR in conjunction with Jon Cone’s Piezography system to print monochrome. Rather than just two shades of black, as the early Epson pigment printers had, or three in the more recent ones, Piezography uses six or seven shades of black / grey and no colour inks. More details on this system and how I use it are in the Piezography and Printing section of this site.