just a taste of what i have been doing lately.
it includes using a cyclone #3 and empire state …
as usual, i have been off the beaten path, i ended up in west greenwich at the plain meeting house
and also found myself at the abandonned and partially redeveloped lonsdale mill complex. i’ve been to both places
before, but its been months. i also found myself at home photographing closely.
cyclone #3, caffemol C + faux dektol
trailer truck along building, overcast sun peeking through
a couple of days ago i was making some more cyanotypes i loaded up some contact frames with waxed negatives to see if i could get a better print than i did with my old coated paper some of those prints just didnt’ work out .. and at the same time i found an old hand coated paper negative made with the cyclone #3 a while ago, that was just sitting on the tabletop. i had cleaned up quite a bit a week or 2 ago: i swept the floor; i organized; i put things away; i stacked things; i found things i hadn’t seen in a while. the paper negative was a rediscovery, even though it wasn’t really lost. it seems like it was coated on xerox paper, it is thin and durable. not sure what emulsion is on it, maybe foma? maybe my home-brew, not sure. it has a nice contrast and look and i stuck it in the contact frame. the waxed negatives took a ton of time before to expose, so i was banking on a day or 2 in the sun for all 3 of the cyanotypes. it was a lot more diffuclt in late october because the sun is low, and it moves across the sky differently than before, so i had to really follow the sun around with the print frames. i did OK i suppose, but i was more in open shade than i was in the sun, and that is OK too. the print is made from the same classic formula i coated the others with. and after 2 days in the sun i washed it in water and added a little hydrogen peroxide to finish the development, and eventually i painted some areas of the print with dilute washing soda to give a yellowish hue to some areas. anyhow, its the kitchen table and window and chairs. not sure if i am going to add my own colors or leave it, the blue tones of cyanotypes are starting to grow on me.
window table and chairs
classic cyanotype H2O2 to develop out faster as i always do, and a little washing soda to bleach and ad color
this is a hand tinted image of a tree &c down the road from me. it was made with either a 8×10 or 11×14 paper negative, i can’t remember which one, but it was run through the empire state … after scanning the image and inverting it, i added some colors.
the wind blew at the coast, the leaves rustled and starlings flew away
a while back i made some paper negative from hand made emulsion the negatives were more like a collage of things, images, textures, brush strokes. i decided to scan big and crop small and the image i retrieved from the paper was a sweet photograph of trees and a fencepost, but it always seemed to be missing something whenever i looked at it. i put it aside for a good 6 months and looked at it a little bit more once i had distance from it
railing and trees
the other day i spent a handful of hours working on it.
i enlarged the canvas, i added colors ( which was i originally had hoped to do )
anyways, i worked and worked added, and subtracted and came up with this
reworked image
it took hours, and it really still isn’t completely done, but it was fun making something that never really existed.
i had a mini project with cups and saucers and bowls and plates. all taken with a large camera on sheet film, processed in coffee and print developer .. scanned and colors added by me .. all sort of green and red, some better than others, all just fun and playing around.
the bottom cups and handles were not taken at the same time, and just sort of fit together and noticed after the fact …
hand colored
you read it right.
i made myself a close up attachment for my graflex slr. i did this a handful of years ago because i wanted to do macro work, or at least “magnified” photographs and couldn’t put a long lens on the camera because of bellows extension. so what did i do ?
i took one of the handful of old junk lenses i had lying around, and assembled something that i could stick in or on or over my camera. i have done this with a few different lenses i use with the slr, and it is fun. the depth of field is nearly gone so you have to be careful what you focus on. you also need to realize that depending on where you have the bellows cranked open to, your lens to subject distance will change, and the magnification will change as well … so the image might end up looking normal not magnified.
this is something i made exposures of last week and assembled as a tri chrome moments ago. i know the colors are a little weird, i kind of like this sort of charm, like a bad fotomat print 😉
because i had excessively expired film and developer i decided to stop down a little bit and make very long exposures.
i am not sure what F-number i stopped down to, my sunshade blocks the numbers, so i will just say 1/8 a turn ..
and the film was exposed for around 15seconds each exposure.
home made close up lens, expired film, and developer
originally …
i made 4 exposures, 1 with NO filtration and 3 others ( RGB ) and i was going to make a trichrome image of these coffee cups that look like stacked bowls but i ran into a little trouble. while i love making exposures and i love processing film, i had no way of identifying the negatives after the film was processed. i suppose if i was some sort of superhero i could look and know what was what, but there is too much stain in the film for me to be able to see which is which. this can sometimes be a problem when processing 36 sheets of film at a time, and they get a little jumbled up 😉
so, instead of spending hours trying to ID the film, or making many many attempted trichromes with photoshop like some sort of mind bending puzzle i decided to take one of the images and hand color it, 4 different ways. i used christmas colors and had some fun.
so, here are a few hand colored photographs.
hand colroed black and white
feel free to poke around on imagekind if you see something that you like they are less expensive than me making the prints by hand 😉
again with my paper negative tests
my dektol tests
my dektol + sumatra coffee developer split development tests
today i loaded film holders up and exposed the negatives in a more controlled environment. i used a graflex series D camera so i cold focus and have a better idea of the exposure than a box camera …
well — sort of.
i also took a light meter reading, something i haven’t done in probably 2 years. i wanted to know the unknowns and make exposures to see what was going on. the first exposures was the middle one the images were all taken through a window — i pointed the meter out and set to iso 6. i read about 6 seconds @ f4. so i focused and stopped down a teeny bit and counted to 8 seconds the 2nd exposure ( far left ) stopped down a quarter turn and about 20-22 seconds. the 3rd exposure was a double exposure. the first one stopped down more than 1/4 turn 20 seconds and then wide open about 4 seconds.
not sure exactly what my fstops were because the lenshood blocks the numbers, i just know it wasn’ t f3.8 and it wasn’t f 32 …
the prints were processed a the same exact time. when the image appeared to come up i switched from dektol to caffenol then back in the dektol for a little boost in contrast i scanned them and inverted them and just barely adjusted the levels. my guess is the exposures and development were pretty much on target and the paper
hasn’t lost much contrast or gained much fog in 15 years since it is old and expired KODAK paper … i wish it didn’t all have kodak professional paper watermarking the back of the paper, or i would contact print the negatives into positive prints, the exposures look good for that too.
dektol sumatranol split
even though this looks like 1 image, if you click on it you will see all 3
i haven’t posted here in a few months for a variety of reasons. but i am here again with a handful of photographs … as seen in a few other of my blog posts, i have been having fun making trichromes.
they are FULL color photographs made using separation filters ( RBG ) and panchromatic black and white film. about 30 years ago my uncle ( a professional photographer in western massachusetts ) told me about making trichromes but i didn’t have access to a color darkroom, so i never made any. NOW, since i am able to compile the images using photoshop i am making them often. i even have a polaroid 500 portrait camera and i have started to make portraits and stereo tri chromes.
here are a few images .. they don’t have any hidden meaning, they are just fun. oh, in case you wanted to know the vital statistics … they were all taken with expired black and white film which was hand processed in a combination of coffee based developer ( sumatranol ) and ansco 130.
