Cyanotypes & Digital negatives

[the color is a little off in this, its not quite as purple]

I have been working on and off with digital negatives for quite some time now, making contact prints on enlarging paper and Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown prints on Arches paper.  However, I have not pursued this consistently enough to really get good at it.  When we moved up here, it seriously disrupted my working in the darkroom. Almost a year ago I did a couple of Cyanotype prints and wrote about it on this blog.

For a whole lot of reasons it wasn’t till today that I did another print.  Three days ago I coated some Arches Cover paper with Cyanotype and put it in a cardboard box to dry.  The next day, when I wanted to print there was no sun, and the day after, I could not find my contact printing frame.  So, finally today Alexandria found the printing frame for me, and the sun was out.  However, by now, the coating on the paper had deteriorated somewhat, plus I had not been precise enough in applying the emulsion, so the prints left a lot to be desired.

I did a test print, and a couple of full prints.  I know from experience that sun exposure for my prints is about 3 to 4 minutes in the full sun, and they came out ok, but since I keep insisting on using cold pressed paper, the surface is a bit rough.  Which I really like at times, but it does not work too well for this image.

[test print drying in the oven]

One novel idea I applied today was drying my prints in the kitchen oven.  That worked superbly, taking only about five minutes per print. Now, don’t try doing that with the paper you have just coated with the Cyanotype emulsion ’cause you will be ‘exposing’ it.

[exposing the image in the sun]

[washing in the kitchen sink]

[digital negatives and prints]

Rodney Smith

If there is one photographer whom I have admired and tried to emulate over the years, it is Rodney Smith.  I never knew much about him except that when I ran across photos in magazines that really resonated with me, it more often then not turned out to be an image by Smith.  When I read about his working methods which apparently involved arriving on the set by himself with one camera, no lights and a bunch of film stuck in his pockets, I was totally smitten.

To my great delight I ran across his blog yesterday.  I had no idea that he was maintaining  one.  It is titled “The End Starts Here.” Like his photographs, it is extremely elegant, witty, honest, and to me totally fascinating.  It blows my mind that there are hardly any comments on his posts, indicating that the number of comments does not equate to anything, certainly does not reflect the quality of the work.

Island Hotel, Cedar Key

I just returned from an overnight trip to Cedar Key.  It was a great visit.  The weather was perfect, in the 60’s and sunny.  I really like the way my street now looks with the new sidewalks, downright ‘upscale.’  That together with the wonderful board walk going out to the little park behind the cemetery, has really improved the neighborhood.  Now there are also two coffee shops in town.  Unfortunately I have not had a chance to try them, but it is a delight to know they are there. One of them is in ‘The Barefoot Artist” gallery, right on the main street, with tables out front and in the side yard.  I will take some pictures next time I am there, and post them.

This morning, with Mike Leiner’s generous help I was able to hang prints of the below images in the Island Hotel. I am delighted to have them up there, and really appreciate that the owners, Stanley and Anyd Bair are so willing to let us exhibit in their great dining room.

“Suwannee Dawn & the Tarnished Mirror”

[Pigment ink print]

“Southern Cross”

[Pigment ink print on silver leaf]

“Oyster Planting”

[Pigment ink print on silver leaf]

Dining Room – Island Hotel

WaterWomen, Bicycle Diaries & The Rings of Saturn

Creative spurts come in wondrous ways. This morning I stopped by the Leon County Library to pick up  David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries which I had requested.  I was totally intrigued by the book when I read that he had been riding his bicycle literally, all over the world.  In the acknowledgment to the book he mentions W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of  Saturn as an inspiration. And also that he had started to blog his travel and tour diary. Somehow this got me to thinking of my WaterWomen ‘book to be’ and that I simply must finish putting it together.

So, now I am going out on a limb once more by blogging about it, and posting screen shots from the layout.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall…”

Hmm, on my screen the image comes out a bit green, when I click on it to go to the silghtly bigger version, it looks better.

New web site

Here is a link to the new website I am developing.  I would appreciate it if you could take a look and give me feed-back.

Warning: It changes from day to day.

“I’m afraid it means leaving you…”

Another of my text/photo images – see post below.

v3 Tallahassee Pecha Kucha Night

1998project

This coming Thursday we will have our ‘volume 3′ Pecha Kucha Night at the 621 Gallery in Tallahassee.
I’ll be talking about my highway 19/98 project, and here is the slide show that will accompany the talk.

“…a moment of doubt”

I have not worked with words on photographs in a long time.  Usually when I do it, I get a so/so feedback to the effect that the words in the image mess up the photo.  However, when I go back to them after they have been filed away for some time, I still like them.  Usually what I do, as I did in this case, is randomly open a book that is laying on my desk and scan the page to see if I can find a phrase that I think applies.

Fire Ants

This morning I took down the work I had on display at the ‘Fire Ants Gallery”. The gallery is tucked away in the far corner of Tallahassee’s funky art quarter better known as ‘Railroad Square.’ Jonathan Markham runs the gallery and he invited me to show some of my work. The high point was the opening night which was on September’s ‘First Friday.’ There was a good crowd at the square and many of them came through Jonathan’s gallery, although it is so tucked away in a corner, that – with vans parked in front of it, it is hardly visible.

Taking down the work was actually pleasurable since the show had looked good. Alexandria had done a fantastic job of hanging it, and I had some of my favorite pieces up. In November I will probably be able to hang a few of my photos again. Looking forward to it. In the meantime, some of the work is going to go to Cedar Key, where a bunch of us have our work up in the dining room of the historic Island Hotel.

Huckleberrey’s

This morning, on my way back from Cedar Key, I finally got a chance to stop and get breakfast at Huckleberry’s in Fanning Springs. There is a photo of the outside of Huckleberry’s in a post below.
An egg, bacon, grits and a piece of toast were $2.45. It all was served very informally in a styrofoam container, and I had a choice of sitting inside in the air-conditioning, or outside in the screened in area. Since the inside looked more interesting, I sat there, on a counter with the prominently displayed ‘Concealed Weapon Permit” number of, I presume the owner.
On the way out, I gave a copy of the outside, panorama print to the cashier, hoping to stop by again, and do some more photos.

New ‘Bodice Ripper’ Cover

Here is my new design for the next ‘Bodice Ripper’ virtual book cover.  I should get the whole image done this weekend.  Designing these is more fun than I thought.

Digital-Photo-What??????

One reason I started this blog was that I wanted a place to write down and clarify my thoughts about digital photography.  I specifically addressed the topic a couple of times, here, and here.

Just now, I ran across a great post by Ctein, whose work and writing I have greatly admired and valued over the years.  If you are interested in the subject, it is well worth reading:

“Picture Postcards?!?

By Ctein

You want to be sitting down for this one.

I’ve made pretty clear my heartfelt belief that the future will lie in informational optics and computational photography and that photographic technology will end up looking almost unimaginably different from what we’ve been using for 150 years.

But, here’s something I didn’t imagine, and sure wasn’t expecting it now. On the unbelievable/cool scale, it’s definitely a 10. We might even have to write an 11 on the dial. For your edification and amazement, two references:

“MIT develops camera-like fabric“

“Exploiting Collective Effects of Multiple Optoelectronic Devices Integrated in a Single Fiber“

Partial Abstract: “We show that a tandem arrangement of subwavelength photodetecting devices integrated in a single fiber enables the extraction of information on the direction, wavelength, and potentially even color of incident radiation over a wide spectral range in the visible regime. Finally, we fabricated a 0.1 square meter single plane fiber assembly which uses polychromatic illumination to extract images without the use of a lens, representing an important step toward ambient light imaging fabrics.”

Simple  description: It’s a fabric, woven out of light-sensitive fibers,  that can make a photograph. All by itself. No lens. No camera. No nuthin’.

(Well, it is backed by a honking big load of computing. In 10 years, that will all be on a chip.)

Frankly, I didn’t want to pay $30 to download the whole paper, but the abstract tells me enough to let me reverse-engineer the basic idea.

Normal, everyday light, on the sub-wavelength scale, can interfere with itself; it acts like a well ordered set of waves. The interference patterns depend on both the wavelength and the direction the photons are coming from. Take Newton rings, for example. Get two shiny surfaces really close to each other, and you’ll see bands of bright and dark colors.

Newton rings tell us a lot about the light that creates them. That pattern depends on the distance the light has to travel between the surfaces, measured in wavelengths. The shorter the wavelength, the closer the bands appear together. The shallower the angle of incidence, the farther apart the bands appear. In other words, that pattern of light and dark bands contains information about the direction the light is coming from and/or its wavelength.

That, I think, is the physics behind the fabric: It’s looking at the interference patterns within fibers, à la Newton rings, and from that, one can extract information about where the photons are coming from and what they’re like.

Which is just what a conventional camera lens and film/sensor does.

I can’t say how far this particular technology could be pushed; I just don’t know.

But just imagine…

It looks kind of like a Polaroid SX 70 print. Hold it up in front of you,  grasping it by the lower right corner. An image of the scene the print “back” is facing appears on the side that you’re looking at. Squeeze the corner between your thumb and forefinger, and the print freezes the image.

Heck, let’s make the lower left corner a zoom control. There’s no reason we should be hobbled by a fixed “focal length” in our magic print; it’s all in the number crunching. Also, the print doesn’t “fix” the image until you squeeze the corner two times rapidly. Then it’s permanent. Otherwise, you can reuse the print, until you get a photograph you want to keep.

I told you you wanted to be sitting down for this one.

Ctein”

Great Street Portrait Video from Wired

“Suwanee Dawn – Bodice Ripper”

Recently I had a great photo session with my friend “Suwanee Dawn.” Going over the photos later, I realized that some of them would look great as cover illustration on Romance novels. So, I went to the library and got several well thumbed copies, and just started on transforming them, using images from the photo session. So, here is my first go at my new “Suwanee Dawn – Bodice Ripper” portfolio.

Portraits with MB

Usually I never post this many images from a single session. I am making an exception here because they are all interesting, and I would love to get everybody’s feed-back.

You will probably notice that there is quite a repetition of photos here – I am after figuring out which looks work with which images.

Neither MB nor I were much interested in coming away from the session with ‘regular’ portraits.

We are both interested in images that speak more to the mood and different ‘atmosphere’ than those that are formal portraits. So, some of them are a bit ‘over-the top’ and don’t look like MB, nevertheless, they are still here – just a side of her that perhaps we don’t often see.

Ovation TV | Sally Mann: What Remains

Here is a wonderful video about Sally Mann working with Collodion.

“WaterWomen Oyster Planting” – Silver Leaf

{click on image to see the sharper version}

This is another inkjet on silver leaf print. The original is a 35mm negative scanned and printed on silver leaf on acrylic paint and watercolor paper. The paper is 13×20 inches. Too big to scan, so this is a digital photo of the finished print. It fairly well approximates the look of the print. However, since it is on silver leaf it has a lot of reflection, depending on where and how it is viewed.

I am learning to appreciate the irregularity of the print, and its marks from the process.

One for Silver Leaf

I reworked this “Tarnished Mirror” image [see previous post] to be printed on silver leaf.  What I would really like to do is print on silver leaf or silver acrylic ground on Arches cover, black.  Will have to give that a try. I think this one is actually a bit better than the original.

Printing on Gold & Silver Leaf

Here are three more digital prints on gold and silver leaf.  Photographing these so they truly reproduce the way the prints look, is something I have not been able to pull off.  These are fairly close, but I feel they still look much better and interesting  in ‘real life.’
They are all on 13×20 inch watercolor paper, with the metal leaf adhered to a ground of acrylic paint.

The top one is from a Holga panorama, the bottom left one from a 35 mm black and white negative, and the gold leaf one from three merged digital layers.

‘Pizza wheels’ be darn

I just finished printing this image on a 13×20 inch sheet of watercolor paper on which the image area was gold leafed – perhaps I should have waited for thing to dry just a bit more before I started printing, hmmm…

Anyhow, as anybody who has done this kind of thing before knows, the ‘pizza wheels’ on the printer can drag through the wet ink surface of the print, and make these notifiable straight lines you see on the left hand side of this print.

I do think I can probably spot it a little to make the marks less noticeable – I am not willing to ‘disable’ the ‘pizza wheels ‘ on my Epson R2400.  Actually I don’t mind them all that much, they simply show the ‘process.’

Photographing or scanning my gold leaf prints is pretty tricky.  In this case, I think I have come pretty close to what the actual print looks like.  I am very satisfied with it.

The original image is a recent one, titled “Screen Door.”

More “Live Bait”

Back in August I posted a color image of this area.  It is just one of those places in Cedar Key that totally fascinates me every time I walk by.  Yet I have never been able to get a perfect picture.  Here is another Holga image from the roll of expired XP-2 I just got back.

Cedar Key claming boats

A three frame Holga panorama from a roll of outdated Ilford XP2 that I took earlier this year and just had developed.

“The Vortex”

Metamorphosis

Here are a couple of panormas showing the  current exhibits that went up in the 621 Gallery last Friday.

Metamorphosis

In the Main Gallery
Opening First Friday, April 3rd, 6-9pm
April 3rd- 27th, 2009

In April, The 621 Gallery presents Metamorphosis, an exhibition revealing the metaphorical context of images and objects through psychological reactions and association. Brandon C. Smith captures emotional, intellectual and psychological moments in a visual context that relates the gross, comical, and kitsch aspects of contemporary culture to frailty and power of the human condition. Carole Loeffler pushes the boundaries of ordinary materials in order to create experiences, personalities, and environments imbued with themes of passion and sensuality. Daisy Winfrey explores themes of emotional trauma, fear, and memory through nostalgic materials intended to captivate the viewer with visual connections to the past. Julie Guyot creates ceramic objects that comment on concept of branding, labeling, and tagging.

Also, in the Nan Boynton Memorial Gallery will be the FSU Art Students’ League.