Long Awaited Post

So I’m not sure that I can finish my project.  We have run out of film for the image setter and without it I really can’t do anything.  I have had a lot fo success with large albumin prints.  They have a wonderfull tonal range very similar to a van dyke, but far more crisp.  I really hope that I can finish printing the rest of the images.

Lee Friedlander….escaping my mind

So I just spent about 40 minutes carefully reading through the book, Factory Valleys by Lee Friedlander. I thought I had been there for far longer than 40 minutes; for the first time in a while time crawled, but it was a wonderfully slow pace. It’s amazing what one can learn about ones own interests and ideas or rather how much more clearly they come into view when you stop focusing on yourself and allow for another persons world to cross yours. Here I must include some pictures from the book:

So now I have a few more ideas for my final project…I think for the first time I’m going to do away with my ‘shoot from the hip’ tendency with photographs, “at least for some of my last project”, and try to force some discretion as to when I take pictures.

Rut

So I’m stuck.  Can’t find motivation to shoot anything and when I try the negatives are all over the place.  My life is stuck in chaos and my photo’s are equally distorted.  In some ways I’m tempted to print the mess of blurs and scratches that I’ve been experiencing but more so I want to make order out of them which is failing.

Fall

I just returned from a bike ride to Wellsville.  The sun was absolutely brilliant, I don’t remember many or any days so beautiful all summer.  There’s something magical about fall sometimes.  I realized today that biking is a great way to get out and take pictures, I shot 3 rolls on the ride, a third of which I took while riding, we’ll see how they come out.  I’ve been finding that being in town really squashes inspiration but just a small trip out of town, seeing something or anything different really changes that.  Some of the country houses and of course the stereotypical barns around here are really great and the people that live in them can be even more interesting.  Met lots of nice dogs along the way and found an old barn full of for sale antiques at the edge of Wellsville, I think in Andover technically.

Chemistry

So I went into the studio yesterday in hopes of making some bad, overexposed cyanotypes to bleech and tone, and there is no ferric ammonium citrate left.  I was going to give up, but then I started researching alternative ways of making cyanotypes with started with research regarding how to synthesize ferric ammonium citrate.  That search failed, but I cam across a recipe using ammonium ferric oxalate.  Turns out we don’t have any of the either.  We do however have ammonium oxalate, oxalic acid and ferric oxalate.  I want to see if their is any way with realtive ease I can make ammonium ferric oxalate out of theese chemicals…the search is on or all I will have are tea toned prints.

Hard Drive

So I haven’t made a new post in a long time for a number of reasons.  First i hate computers, I used to own a business fixing them and now they are something I’d like to burn.  First while fixing my home computer with 3 hard drives full of images, I happened to get my finger stuck in the fan and then bled on the motherboard and fried all the drives and the computer.  So I decided to make a wooden external hard drive so I could restart the process of having anything for this class.  Here’s a picture:

As I was sitting here taking the picture, my computer stopped printing all the images I made and diden’t save.  So now I’m going to go and restart onece again.

Beautiful Blue Prints

They started to work….I’ve had a lot of trouble getting any kind of range with my cyanotypes coupled with the fact that I’m using pinhole negative that blow up poorly.  But I found an interesting variable.  If you paint you paper; a large sheet and then let it age before you use it, the development process is shortened significantly.  By significantly I mean a freshly dried and exposed piece of paper was taking me upwards of 3 hours, but If I let it sit in the dark overnight and longer the times from to anywhere between 7 and 30 mins.

Anyway look at some of these beautiful pinholes printed on cyanotype:…there can be tones…

So I’ve been working on these pinhole images and I can’t seem to find a balance between the negatives being well exposed but having little detail in the lights, or overexposed and having a lot of detail in the whites.  I’m sure the biggest reason for this is that I have been trying to take mostly indoor, artifical light pictures.  Because I have become so accustomed to needing very long exposure times I can’t seem to adapt when I take a picture outside so as a result they end up burned out.  I’ve also been having a bit of trouble with the inconsistencys between all of the electronics being used to enlarge negatives.  When the negative is scanned it is altered slightly which so far hasen’t been to much trouble to fix but the printer doesent print anything close to what is on the screen; I’ve been finding that I really need to darken all of the pictures before I print them for them to retain any of their depth.

Many little holes…

After spending about 6 dollars in one hour on pinhole failures I’ve taken to doing some reading, I’d love to just keep failing to learn but I’m too poor for that yet.  So I’ve found as I’m sure we all know that there is not one generic pin, and therefore no generic pinhole.  I started with 2 round bottomed containers that will likely be retired as I am tired of cutting circles in the dark.   I have yet to make a standard pinhole box (that’s Saturday), but I have an oval container in which 1 full sheet can go in, and I am using 3 small pin holes.  From the small success I have had I can tell that since they are so small the image will be relatively sharp and they are so near to each other that the repeated image is more of a shadow than overlap which is what I wanted.  The only problem has been that I’m busy all day so I’ve only been able to use artificial light which has proved to be far more difficult that I imagined.  Someone told me they got overexposed film at 10 seconds with a similarly sized hole and the same film speed.  As such I attempted 10, 20, and 30 seconds and got almost nothing at all in most cases.  I then went on the try a 2 minute exposure in a well lit room and only got the lightest outlines.  So for those of you who want to try artificial light pinholes I suggest you take the term pinhole lightly.  As for me I need to master the tiny hole I began with but for my next few boxes the hole will grow.  Lastly I found that there is a simple equation to help with the creation of the ideal sized hole for the camera used, not accounting for light.    d= 1.9√fλ, meaning 1.9 times the square root of (f times λ).   λ= light wavelength, which in our case would be 550 for B&W, and f being the distance from the hole to the film in meters.  I have yet to use this nor am I sure how I would make such as accurately measured, tiny hole, but just in case anyone wanted to know.

Picking through the Hoard

So I began the process of seeking out different things I can turn into pictures and have realized that if there are 50 process’s still used today, there are 200 variations and/or unique ones forgotten.  I’d like to remind us about some of them.

Although this one hasn’t been forgotten entirely I ran across a website talking about chlorophyll processing. Hey fall is coming…The artest’s name is Binh Dahns.  He uses the plants natural cycle of carbon dioxide and chlorophyl production to develop his negative on the actual plan materal and then seals them in resin.

I really enjoy that this work not only takes direct advantage of the sun as the light source, but also that one major chemically involved step is eliminated and one can make prints with nothing more than a few negatives and a sunny day.

Just one of the ideas I’ve been looking at

If anyone is looking for a place to start go to Alternative Photography.  It’s a good place to start espcially if you looking for some examples of the different process’s.