Journal Entries
I try to do or make interesting things on a regular basis. Here are some words and photos about my exploits.
Ether is definitely in the air these days (along with a hell of a lot of pollen, apparently). Two tintype posts in one day…not that any season isn’t a fine time to make tintypes, but...
A photographer came to the Alt Pro class yesterday so we wanted to give him something visible to photograph – like a nice big 8×10 camera in action. (Basically I use any excuse to make...
I had thought I was perfectly happy with my 4×5 – seemed like the negatives were plenty large – and once I got into historical process printing I could make my (digital) negatives any size...
After watching several workshops make calotypes – one of the earliest forms of photography – I finally got a chance to make that step back in time myself. The process is a little slower and...
Back when I started to get excited about tri-color gum printing I thought I’d begin with some bolder colors – seemed obvious and somehow easier. Don’t know if it is either of those, but it...
It’s that time of year again when Brenton Hamilton’s Advanced Alternative Processes class piles in a van and heads up to Trenton, Maine, to spend a day working in Alan Vlach’s photogravure studio. Since there...
Way back over Christmas break I got motivated to design some rubber stamps to use for marketing materials. Kari’s mom, coincidentally, has a ton of stamps and stamp pads of various colors, so for a...
Last December, while on Christmas break in Minnesota, I finally had the chance to try doing wetplate photography in sub-freezing temperatures. While our dark tent and chemicals were in a warm dry house, the cameras...
This past Christmas Kari gave me an old black box camera – turns out to be an Agfa Ansco 2A Antar, I believe, which seems to be a circa 1930s camera. I guess they liked...
This post really should be more interesting than the title sounds. It’s not a chemistry lesson, I promise! A little over a year ago I started learning about historical photographic printing processes, or “Alternative processes”...
No, this isn’t a story about a new flavor of chewing gum. The “gum” in the title refers to a photographic printing process called “gum bichromate”, which uses watercolor pigment, potassium dichromate, and the eponymous...
I’ve recently become interested in two somewhat-related things: first, producing hand-made prints from my images, and secondly, creating distinct and coherent bodies of work. The first of these, then, are a series of prints from...