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17 March 2021
16 March 2021
Three More
Yesterday was cold and blustery; the high was in the teens. We had the stove in the basement going so the temperature there was in the upper 50s. All of which made spending the afternoon in my basement dim room appealing.
I made ten salted-paper prints from four negatives and added some experiments in toning the prints with gold/borax.
The first print below (“Untitled”) is on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag and is untoned. The second print (“Cobblestones”), on BFK Rives, is toned for a short time. The last print (“Farm Field Fence”), on Rives Heavyweight, is toned pretty much to completion.
As usual, showing the subtilties in these prints after scanning them is always suspect. The artifacts are best experienced in hand.
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13 March 2021
Thaw!
Spring is not quite here yet, but there are faint signs that it is coming.
We had a few days of temperatures in the 50’s, in might have actually reached 60 the other day. We even had a night in which it stayed above freezing. The snow is rapidly receding, the ice is pulling back from the edges of the lake and, of course, there is lots of mud in the road!
However, the next few days the high temperatures will be in the 30s and there are two nights predicted to be in the single digits. So Spring is not quite here yet!
The photos shown here were made on walks over the past four days.
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5 March 2021
Trees
I have been making photographs of trees in winter, showing their “bones” for a a couple of years. Most of these photos are made using my camera obscura.
I decided that these photos might look good as salted-paper prints and thus prepared negatives from six images in this series. I finished making 4×5 inch prints on Stonehenge Warm paper yesterday.
I have many more images in this series, that I think I will print this way in the coming weeks/months.
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Missouri River Homestead
The end of September 2017… Joan and I had left Yellowstone National Park via the northeast corner of the park and Cooke City. We were headed north through central Montana; our eventual goal was Malta.
After spending a night in Roundup, we continued on our way north. We made an unscheduled and very productive stop at the CM Russell National Wildlife Refuge where US191 crosses the Missouri River. There is a wildlife drive through the refuge on the north side of the river here.
In addition to river access, this gravel road is a hot spot for viewing elk during rutting season, i.e. at the end of September! However, this post is not about those photos!
Rather, this post is about the photos I made of an old river bottom homestead that is a short walk off the refuge road; I wrote about this site and showed the photos I made back in 2017.
Recently, I revisited these photos as I thought they would be good candidates for warm tones of salted-paper prints, an old, so called “alternative” photographic process. Or, in the words of Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer, an “ancient but still unconventional medium”. (Said about cyanotype, but equally applicable here!) I wrote about this process a couple of weeks ago when I made my first salted-paper print.
On Wednesday, I finished making salted-paper prints of nine photographs of this riverine homestead. The prints are 4″x5″ on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag paper and are untoned. The scans I show here are a inadequate representation of the actual artifacts. The prints really need to be seen and held to fully experience, but in these days of COVID this will have to suffice for now.
I am planning to make a set of larger prints, but I am still mulling over how large. I have the trays needed to make prints on 11×14 inch paper (i.e. an image size of about 8×10 inches. However, I’m not sure that I have the space needed.
I would really like to make 11×14 inch prints but I have neither trays large enough nor a large enough space for all of the trays needed. The cost of the chemicals also becomes a factor in making large prints. An 11×14 image is almost eight times the area of a 4×5 image and thus requires eight times the chemicals.
I’m thinking that I should work out the mechanics of making large prints with cyanotype before attempting prints involving silver! I’ll probably have to also wait for warmer weather when I can set up tables for trays in the garage… we’ll see!
Anyway, here are the 4×5 inch prints:
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