More experimentation with cyanotypes and toning in coffee. These are all old negatives.
Drift until you brutalize
Blues in my bread
I haven’t worked much with cyanotypes because I don’t really care for blue prints. But with Covid keeping me out of the darkroom and all the ingredients sitting in my studio, it made sense to try.
A little research made it clear that toning gave me more options than just blue. Here are the results so far. look for more as I work through the process.
The blue
The black: coffee
The gold: tea
Living together
We got a COVID kitten.
Can’t shake the feeling
Went out with the Nikon fm2 and a roll of Svema MZ3. Makes the world seem darker.
Long time passing
The garden is in bloom!
Long live Diana
The good thing about Diana’s is that they are still relatively cheap. I picked up a new one off the eBay and took it for a spin yesterday.
These are shot in Ilford FP4+ and stand developed in HC-110.
Där får man värme och ljus
Plans change. Normally we would go to western Massachusetts to celebrate midsommar in late June. But we were supposed to be in Italy and France around this time. Then the plague came. That’s how we ended up celebrating the solstice in this lovely house in Paxinos (pack-SAI-nus) PA.
Moke from Shamokin
Shamokin is a coal town in central PA. It seems to have been hit hard by the loss of coal and industry jobs and the opioid crisis. The population is about 7,000 now, down from a peak of 50,000 in the 50s.
Shamokin has an interesting labor history, including the Shamokin Uprising of 1877.
I only spent a few hours there—barely enough to scratch the surface.
RIP Diana
I dropped the Diana maybe one too many times and it seems it’s gone to meet its maker.
Here are some of the last salvageable images from it. They feel melancholy and reflect my muddy view of the past few weeks.
First go at lumen prints
A while ago I accidentally bought a box of Arista Ortho-Litho 3.0 that was too big for my 4×5 film holders. (This film comes in two sizes, one that is cut down a 1/10th of an inch to fit in film holders and one that’s not.) It’s been sitting around since then gnawing at me to figure out something to do with it. So when I recently found out about lumen prints, it clicked.
Lumen prints are typically made by exposing photo paper to the sun for a long time, anywhere from a half hour to a day. The result is that the paper sort of auto develops and you get an image. Typically they are made as photograms with organic material on photo paper. But you can use a negative to make a contact print. And you can use film instead of paper.
My first thought was I would make contact prints and display them with a backlight. So here are my first contact prints, scanned and tweaked slightly. They look pretty good. I’ve sent them to be printed as 8x10s. Curious to see how they look. Next step is to build some cardboard frames for them to see if I can light them
Another option I am considering is making photograms and then printing them in the enlarger. I just need to scrounge up some material.
