About TruNeg

TruNeg was created by Australian photographer and photography educator John Riches. John is a past President of the Victorian Division of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography and was Director of Photography at the Australian College of Photography Art & Communication. His early personal work focused on the Australian temperate rainforest which presented a particularly strong visual and technical challenge because of its complex visual structure and often extreme contrasts. To cope with these problems John developed a personal work approach using bespoke chemistry and development techniques to evolve a particular fine print style with subtle luminous highlights and deep rich shadows.

Prints of this work were exhibited in and collected by the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and are represented in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

John’s exploration of the digital negative began when he started carbon printing to make a series of very dark and inky images called Myths, Legends & Hallucinations.

Beginning from scratch, while the carbon process itself was quite quickly conquered the problem of making a good digital negative was not. Some progress was made but no consistent results could be achieved. Different approaches were investigated many of which appeared unnecessarily complicated for what seemed a simple mathematical problem of the failure of the simple inverted image. To solve the problem John went back to the DlogE curve of Hurter and Driffield to digitally re-establish the logarithmic structure of the silver gelatin negative.

After a couple of years of thinking, work and testing TruNeg is the result.