Adult Content Contained Herein

My apologies if I took anyone by surprise. There are some nudes in this blog in images I make or perhaps from a photographer I am referring to. As in my postings on Adelaide Hanscom and John Dugdale. I got flagged for objectionable content.

I found the option on searching through the pop up on setting the material to be flagged as containing Adult Content.

I've noticed museums increasingly having notices about nudity and content for exhibitions.

Anyway, if you choose to enter I hope you enjoy my blog. If you entered because the warning led you to look forward to a titillating experience I apologize for the boredom you are about to go through. 

A Rainy Day in California

Our governor has declared a drought emergency in California. While I know it is childish, it is safe to say that our governor can beat up your governor.

As I wandered around downtown in the rain today during this emergency, I decided to grab that picture of Palo Alto Blueprint & Supply Company while I could. I've been hammering away at cyanotypes again the past few days, and I have had success. So it is on my mind.

I also took care of recycling with my son, and dropping things off at the dump that I no longer want as I try to organize my life - well, my garage - making room to work around my Takach etching press and for the things my wife is buying in preparation for the new child coming into our lives. A weekend of making way for the new, and discarding the old. Including the table I had gotten from my mother. I really no longer use it.

My son handed me my camera at the Palo Alto recycling center. After they rearranged everything at the recycling center recently (and eliminated recycling of styrofoam), I noticed that they had specific bins for recycling blueprints. I thought "How odd." when I first saw it three weeks back. My son said a worker compressing some recycling eyed me with boredom today as I took some pictures. I poked a bit around on the web when I got home and I suspect that blueprints are recycled separately because they were processed with ammonia?

How many kids growing up today know what a blueprint is? How long before the only knowledge of the word blueprint is its second definition?

I've never gone into Palo Alto Blueprint and Supply. I'm tempted to. Because that is a mighty big pencil in the window.

Mark Nelson has never sounded better

I recently purchased a Kindle 2. I'm one of those people that iPhone and other gadget makers target. I like to play with toys. It probably explains my deep relationship with my X-Rite 810 densitometer.

I have an original Kindle also - a Christmas present from my wife. I was resistant at first, but then started using the Kindle to hold various manuals and PDF documents off the web, instead of carrying them around with me while traveling.

The Kindle 2 has a couple of improvements over the original version. It is a little easier to use with better button placements (it was hard to pick up the old Kindle without hitting a button). It is sleeker and more attractive. It displays images with 16 shades of gray compared to the previous 4, which is a remarkable improvement (and reminiscent of LCD screens from the 1980's).

And it has the ability to translate Text to Speech, with a choice of speaking voice: male or female. I think you see where this is going...

I'm finding the Kindle 2 mildly fun and useful in the darkroom where I turn on Text to Speech while I work. Since it uses E-ink screen technology and is not a backlit LCD, it can be used in the speech mode in the darkroom easily. I was listening the other night to A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (one of my favorite books) while completing my work on Mike Ware's New Cyanotype and my old stock of Crane's Weston Diploma paper. 

I couldn't send the original PDF to my Kindle e-mail account to convert and download to my Kindle - it may have been too large for my mail system. I reduced the size from the original 24MB to 6MB using Adobe Acrobat Pro (part of Creative Suite 4) to optimize the PDF.

I think I need a slightly more sexy voice. Something with a British accent? Precision Digital Negatives read by the female voice of the Kindle 2 sounds like being lectured to by a stern librarian with no sense of humor.

I don't think this technology is going to replace Mark Nelson instructing directly, or is a serious threat to audio books in the near future. But it is pleasantly distracting while working in the darkroom.

Cavallo Point Lodge

I met Beth Moon this morning to look over some vintage and modern photogravures I've picked up recently. I brought books The Sonnets from the Portuguese, Taken from Life, and The Artistic Side of Photography. I brought a portfolio of photogravures by Laryew titled Nus: Cent Photographies Originales de Laryew circa 1920, and two separated photogravure leaves from Stieglitz's publication Camera Work.

Beth suggested we meet at Cavallo Point Lodge, where Elizabeth Opalenik and Brigitte Carnochan had taken her for her birthday. This is a very cool find. The hotel is situated at the base of a turnoff on the road to Sausalito just over the Golden Gate Bridge in the historic Fort Baker. The converted army quarters from the turn of the 19th century are beautifully appointed and afford a stunning view of the bridge spanning to San Francisco. Beth's reason for this meeting place was the public spaces are used to display photographic exhibitions.

I arrived a bit early, as there was no traffic. I walked into the restaurant area to grab a table and a cup of coffee. As I put down my backpack, I saw above my table a print of a magnolia by Imogen Cunningham. I walked up to the hostess and asked if there was a description of the Cunningham exhibition, and of course there was. All works from the Imogen Cunningham Trust are for sale. I walked around the room between sips of coffee.

Beth arrived and mentioned that all the rooms have works by contemporary photographers, and the gift shop offers monographs describing the work to accompany your stay in a room. We looked through the books above, and compared the photogravure leaf of Rebecca from Camera Work by Frank Eugene to a smaller photogravure of the same image in The Artistic Side of Photography. The Camera Work piece had much greater detail and tonal scale than the book print, and was gorgeous.

The last book we looked at was Volume III of the Journal of 21st Photography, The Clandestine Mind. Featuring the work of photographer John Dugdale, the deluxe book has seven photogravures (printed by Jon Goodman) and remaining images printed in lush tritone. The photogravures had a depth and a texture the excellent tritones lacked that held our gaze allowing little escape.

Beth took me to another common area on the second floor that was showing several large works from the series Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert before we ran off on our separate ways.

Don't forget to check out the art in the bathrooms. 

"Well played!" whispered Monica.

I have been acquisitive of books on photography from the late 1800's and early 1900's for a few reasons. First and foremost is to get original source material on photographic printing processes that were not yet considered historical at the time. Second, I've been looking for images of vintage equipment and advertisements for use in this blog. Third, I've been looking for fine examples of photogravures and some books from this period have exquisite examples. 

One such find was The Artistic Side of Photography: In Theory and Practice by A. J. Anderson, a fundamental statement on pictorial photography published in 1910 with hand pulled gravures whose production was overseen by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

I curled up the other night reading it and relishing the gravures. The book's curious structure is one of presenting the material on pictorial photography then recapping the points in analogy with a third person (besides the reader and the author) named Monica. I wanted to share one brief dialogue (with two gravures from the book), which as I read the passage was left wondering if photography was a metaphor for something else.

LEAF FROM MY NOTE-BOOK

The Pianola versus Billiards

"They say," said Monica sadly, "that artistic photography is like playing the pianola; and I don't like the pianola, Mr. Anderson."

"They do say it. I have heard even Evans say it; but it isn't true." The girl's face brightened.

"If I had to make a print from a negative taken by someone else, and my work consisted only in softening some parts and emphasizing others, then I should be like a pianola player. Pictorial photography is like billiards."

"Go on! Please go on!" urged Monica.

"One has to calculate the angles at which the light rebounds from an object, just as one has to calculate the angles at billiards; one has to calculate the rebound from soft and coloured objects, just as one has to calculate the absorption of energy and alteration of angle in the rebound from a soft cushion; one has to get the exact strength in both exposure and development, just as one has to get the exact strength in a billiard stroke; and one has to play for the break. A break commencing with exposure and ending with a perfect print from an enlarged negative is no small break, and each step must lead up to the next."

"Well played!" whispered Monica.

"All this time the hand is governed by the eye and brain, just as in billiards; but herein lies the difference: in making a billiard break, two players aim at exactly the same result - an addition to the score; whilst in photography each artist aims at something entirely original. Good average pictorial photographers are about as common as good average billiard players; but taking everything into consideration, is it strange that absolutely first-class men are rare?"

"No, indeed." said Monica.

"As rare as a Roberts or a Stevenson?"

Some Technical Notes from David Michael Kennedy

David Michael Kennedy is an accomplished photographer and palladium printer. His landscape work is moody and immediate. I love his portrait work - and the way he expresses them in his prints. Rangefinder Magazine has an interesting profile on him.

But, once again, I digress.

He has published some extensive technical notes on palladium printing technique on his website that I stumbled across while looking for information on how much Tween 20 (a non-ionic detergent - by the way) to use to help an emulsion, in my case cyanotype, absorb into the fibers of the paper.

Realize, dear reader, that many of these alternative processes are related - or at least have related challenges. Scout around in other processes when looking for solutions to a problem you may run into.

Light Sensitivity of Alternative Processes

So, I've been preparing some scans of the various steps of making an image in cyanotype. I'm not the most accomplished print scanner (just setup my Epson V750 scanner which I had bought some time back to scan some 8" x 10" black and white negatives I have). I use a discontinued Imacon (now Hasselblad) 646 film scanner for my 4" x 5" film work which is similar to the current Flextight X1 model.

But I digress.

I scanned a dried but not exposed sheet of Arches Platine to illustrate the color to expect of a good emulsion and as I retrieved the paper to print my digital negative to show the next step I noticed it had partially printed out where it was exposed to the scanner fluorescent light.

Did I mention the cyanotype process is a printing out process?

The cyanotype process is slow as these things go, exposure that is. Depending on the strength of your UV light source exposures can range to 15 minutes or more. I was somewhat surprised that the sheet partially printed out from the scanner light, but shouldn't have been.

For the UV sensitive alternative processes you don't work in a darkroom as much as a dim room. I use a low wattage incandescent bulb, definitely not one of the newer energy efficient fluorescent replacements! If I coat multiple sheets of paper, I will put them in a black portfolio box to keep away from all light. If I'm simply drying a couple sheets for some quick work I leave out and I don't stick around to watch - but do turn off the incandescent light while I go watch another episode of Tales of Tomorrow.

For reproducible results, and preservation of one's sanity, controlling variables such as ambient illumination, humidity, and temperature can eliminate transient problems in your work.

That said, I am quite vexed by a mottling of the lighter mid-tones of my test cyanotype image. Another test awaits.

Feeling a Bit Blue

Bleu, bleu, le monde est bleu.

I spent the past couple days wrestling with classic cyanotype. This is somewhat embarrassing, given the supposed ease with which this most basic of processes can be done. Invented by John Herschel (a famous polymath) in 1842, it is simplicity itself. Two chemicals, expose in sun, develop in water, dry. Voilà! Anna Atkins created the first photography book consisting of sublime photograms of British Algae using this process.

Above is the cyanotype paper after a 6 minute UV exposure and before water development. Note the dark tone reversal (Prussian White, which reverses back to Prussian Blue on oxidation in air).

I've had two problems. Well, maybe there's a third one.

First, I've had runoff of the emulsion in the water wash. At various times as I've approached this process I've made small steps of progress. The cyanotype process does not like alkaline environments. Papers, contamination, or water. I purchased an Extech PH100 meter to determine that my tap water was alkaline (8.5 pH). So I now acidify my water a bit. I tried several papers as I've mentioned before. Crane's Platinotype and Crane's Weston Diploma had a lot of emulsion runoff for me. Bergger COT-320 (my preferred palladium printing paper) did not work well either. It has been somewhat frustrating in that I spend a bit of time with it and then go off to work on something else and return after a period of months to consider it again.

Obviously I'm not really worrying about this.

Mark Nelson told me that Sam Wang clears his cyanotypes by simply inverting the paper in a tray of water and letting it quietly sit. I was washing the paper, and fiddling with it as I had done for palladium prints. Sam's method is simple and helps reduce the runoff. In trading e-mails with him in the past couple days he said he clears his prints for "5 to 10 minutes" in reaction to my 30 minute clearing stake in the ground ("Life's too short to wait half an hour!", to which I agree).

The biggest reduction in runoff I've gotten is from switching to Arches Platine, per Mark Nelson's suggestion of Christina Z. Anderson's preferred paper for cyanotype (I think?). I am able to smoothly rod coat it, making sufficient passes to get an even coat without puddling of emulsion on the surface. Crane's papers buckled quickly before absorbing the cyanotype emulsion when I tried rod coating before - and then would abrade on hake brush coating making the surface rough. I air dry the Arches paper and then bring it to bone dry with a hair dryer before exposure.

The struggle this weekend on runoff has to do with exposure time. I was told early on during one of my attempts that underexposure will result in emulsion runoff. And I seemed to verify this weekend that a 20 minute exposure had little or no runoff. However, I ended up with an overexposed print (as measured by a Stouffer 31 step wedge designed by Mark Nelson and available on his web site). This irks me - I prefer not to overexpose prints handspring in compensation around it. When I dropped exposure time to eliminate the blocking of shadows in the step wedge, runoff occurred. My goal is at this point to keep it to a minimum.

The second problem I've been having is bleeding of the Prussian Blue into the highlights. This was truly problematic with Crane's Platinotype. A white highlight was not in my ability to pull of with that paper. The technique of fast oxidation by dipping the cleared print briefly in a water bath with a small amount of hydrogen peroxide made the bleeding much worse. Two changes seem to have solved this problem. First, Arches Platine is the cyanotype wonder paper in my book. It is bleed resistant. The second factor was some recent experiments by Chris Anderson. Her web page illustrates the bleeding issue well. The short of it is reducing the proportion of  the ferric ammonium citrate in the emulsion eliminated bleeding. My emulsion is now 1 part water, 1 part Solution A (20 gm ferric ammonium citrate/100 ml distilled water), 2 parts Solution B (8 gm potassium ferricyanide/100 ml distilled water), and one drop of Tween 20 10% solution per 60 drops of emulsion. The Tween 20 help to spread the emulsion uniformly and I added after seeing some beading of the emulsion on the paper during coating. A little goes a long way.

So, much progress was made this weekend. To the right is the developed print after a 7 minute inverted clearing in a mildly acidified water bath, followed by a 30 second inverted immersion in a water bath to which a splash of hydrogen peroxide was added. The bleeding problem is non-existent - I lay the paper flat on a blue shop paper towel and press another sheet on top to remove the excess water before allowing to air dry.

I'm now struggling with blocking in shadows. Looking for some insights from Mark at this point. 

My third problem is one perhaps of perfectionism. Yes, cyanotype is an easy process. But I'm thinking like any printing process (especially alternative processes) it is easy to get a print. To get an excellent print, and to be able to reproduce that feat for other images. Ah, there's the rub.

Tomorrow is another day, I'll take my wins to bed.

Early Morning is for Printing

I woke this morning at 6AM to catch up on printing, turned off the clock and slept for another hour. That said, at 7AM I went to my darkroom, trimmed a steel backed Toyobo Printight KM 73 photopolymer plate to size using a sturdy 18" Dahle guillotine paper cutter (using the polymer plate on the bed which retains the flat edge on cut), and printed my PDN calibration tablets and a Stouffer 31 step tablet once again (1m 10s for the positive exposure, 1m 15s for the aquatint screen) to zero in on my standard exposure time for my UV box from Edwards Engineered Products.

Kim Weston told me several years back when I first met him that he wakes at 3AM to do his printing for the day. Having stayed at Bodie House (where Charis Wilson wrote many of the words that accompanied Edward Weston's photographs in books like California and the West), I can certainly attest that Kim was completed printing the previous day's negatives by the time I stumbled for a cup of coffee at 7:30AM. He has been printing early in the morning since the days when he assisted his father Cole and his uncle Brett in the darkroom.

Printing is a quiet time for me, and something I do alone. Compared to the digital darkroom, the traditional darkroom - and more so the very traditional alternative process darkroom (or incandescently-lit-room) - is a very tactile experience. Cutting, paper texture, brushing and cleaning of surfaces, liquids (use gloves please), printing frames, brushes, scrubbing, washing etc. I find it quite engaging in a fundamental way. And I always feel closer to the work compared to my time spent digitally printing.

I have done most of my darkroom study with Kim Weston. I remember much of what he has taught me. There's a dry side and a wet side to the room. One hand is dry, one is wet when transferring across. Clean towels in the middle, wash your hands and dry them thoroughly to avoid contamination of materials. 

Watching Kim work is fascinating. It became second nature to him long ago - efficient, directed, fluid like his shooting with an 8"x10" camera. Kim shoots in the studio with natural light, so printing in the early morning fits. You have a chance to look at previous day's work, and have the daylight hours to shoot some more.

So, those quiet times early in the morning are a time for printing.

I have noticed that photographers by and large who print their own work early in the morning are also accomplished nappers.

Exciting times in Landscape Photography

If there is an exciting time for landscape photography it is sunrise or sunset.

It's 5AM and I'm thinking about Alain Briot's dictum to "Focus." It could well apply to me eyes at this moment and my wish for some psychoactive drug like caffeine to make me bigger, stronger, more awake.

Here in Death Valley I've once again had the opportunity to wonder "Where are all the people at sunrise?" I see lovers holding hands at sunset - perhaps they are still in bed exploring other landscapes?

Lighting is critical in photography. Not only does the lighting change over an hour (soft light before dawn included), but the times also provide a low angle of incidence helping model the landscape in patches of shadow and light, bringing features to relief. At midday the same features may appear flatter in a photograph with less useful strong contrast that fails to add depth. 

Mapping a 3D world on to a 2D representation in a photograph requires some thought to make it work best. And shadows - the flip side of light - are your friend. Other visual clues help suggest depth in your photograph - size relationships, aerial perspective, and tone.

I will say this though, more than any other fine art photography genre, landscape photography builds character.

I'm late.

Why do alternative processes?

A common question asked is "Why do alternative processes?" I suspect the answer is very personal to each artist.

I'll take one thing off the table immediately - you don't explore alternative processes to simplify and streamline your life to free up time for other activities. I was musing during a workshop with Larry Shapiro that taking on oil printing as a process could easily fill any spare time I had left. 

If you want expediency, volume, and color - consider a digital camera and printer. I use them for my color work.

My interest in alternative processes is idiosyncratic.

First, I think alternative photographic processes allow you to express a print in a seemingly endless variety of ways. The processes are not for someone who wants to quickly produce many copies of single print. In many processes, there is a craftsman approach to the print, with handwork (as in oil printing) making each print unique. The multitude of processes allow for a wide variety of papers, pigments, emulsions, and application methods for expressing one's artistic vision. Something for everyone. 

Second, the processes are physically engaging. Frankly, sitting in front of computer (which I do a lot of) doesn't excite me. In fact, I spent a great deal of time studying efficient digital workflows and printing with the goal of spending less time in front of a computer and more time making images. I find alternative processes very tactile - textures and liquids and action - the direct physical connection to the process influences my approach to image making. I like playing with this stuff!

Third, I am fascinated by the history and the accomplished practitioners of the various processes. When I do a cyanotype, I'm thinking of John Herschel, of Anna Atkins, and John Dugdale. It adds a depth to my approach, it influences my shooting when I anticipate expressing the print in a given process.

Fourth, I find alternative processes intellectually stimulating. Detailed knowledge is required for some processes and I find it stimulating to "crack the code" and work towards mastering it. I've been scouring the web for used original source books from the late 1800's that describe the processes from the early practioner's viewpoint. Hazardous materials wasn't much of a concept back then seemingly (can you say "uranium toning"). 

I'm just beginning on this journey really.