Winter printing

A couple of days ago, I got into the darkroom to start working on a new set of negatives. It had been a while. In fact, my last printing session was long enough ago that it was still warm outside – a full season has passed since then! The rhythm has changed. Printing in the winter is different than the rest of the year.

My darkroom sink is about 15’ wide. 6-9 trays fit in it depending on the tray sizes needed on any given day. That’s pretty good. But when you consider 1) exposure times ranging from 1 ½ to 15 minutes/print, and 2) development times in the water trays anywhere from 30 minutes to all day (or more!), you can see it doesn’t take long before every tray is occupied.

From the beginning of March through October, the covered, open-air woodshop attached to my darkroom doubles as an overflow platform for supplementary trays. When the trays in the sink are occupied, I simply lay more trays outside, filling them with water from a nearby hose. That as-needed provision allows for non-stop printing throughout the day. Exposing 24 different prints or more on a spring, summer, or fall day is no problem.

The renowned proto-gummist Robert Demachy suggested 50 F degree as the ideal water temperature for developing gum. (His book Photo-aquatint is a must read for any gummist. A paperback reprint of the original 1901 book is available through ULAN Press.)

50 degrees seems a bit cool to me. But here our subject is gum printing. And to that we say “To each his own!” 

On the other hand, I think there might be universal agreement that less than 50 degrees would not be advantageous. So the Overflow Deck isn’t available from November through February. And that means that prints brushed and dried with negatives attached, lay in waiting, stacked up like airplanes at a busy airport, waiting to land, waiting to take off. For me, that means more waiting around for prints to “develop.” Time to switch gears. It's winter printing season!

I fact checked the 50 degree reference in Demachy’s book a minute ago and while searching for the reference, came across an interesting distinction he makes concerning the gum development process. He wrote, along with his English counterpart Alfred Maskell, that the English word "development" implies “the heightening in character of that which already exists faintly." But they make the point that that's not what happens in a gum tray.

The gum process is more like “the removal of a veil.” He preferred the word he used in his native French, depouillement. “It means the despoiling, stripping, unclothing, revealing, discovering, getting rid of the superfluous.” It’s a fine and thoughtful distinction and a good way to close this post out.

On seeing and remembering

Winter has begun to show its face here. Most of the leaves that are going to fall to the ground have done so. It's time to get out the blower and the rakes. What remains of the canopy in the woods, other than the ubiquitous and perennial North Carolina pine, are tree skeletons – a favorite photographic subject of mine.

         Best Farm

I’m always surprised when I "discover" that I have a theme or subject that I’ve photographed for years – without being aware of it. How could a subject that I’ve photographed countless times, under multiple conditions, and for years at a time, go unnoticed as a subject of note? The human psyche is a marvel!

Discovery comes as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s always insightful to discover and explore patterns in one’s life. What is it about trees set against an open sky or field that attracts my attention? Draws camera to eye? Why does it call out to me in that way?  And if the eye is the window to the soul as the ancients believed, what then of the camera's aperture? And of the one who opens and closes it?

On the other hand, discovery brings conscious awareness with it. And conscious awareness affects the act of exploration. It affects how we see. I think of those zen books on seeing here.

               Lake Chautauqua

It’s harder to let go of preconceptions and simply see – see the essence of a place or thing -- when you’re simultaneously remembering, doing a comparative search not only of what stands before you but of what you’ve done before.  Remembering can certainly help clarify, can help tweak your aim for the better, but it can also stultify vision.

What once drew your attention spontaneously and openly has become a thing with a name. A thing you’ve seen before. And that creates a veil, or worse, a wall, that makes seeing the essence of a place or thing that much more challenging.

                Along Antietam Creek

The Studio Tour

The first weekend of the Orange County Artists Guild Open Studio Tour has come and gone and this coming Saturday and Sunday will close out the Tour for this year.

Traffic was light last Saturday and for that I was actually thankful. It rained in the morning and remained bone chillingly cool and damp throughout the day. Since I show outdoors, (under open cover), lighter than usual traffic meant being able to stay inside from time to time where it was warm and dry. I spent the time printing note cards of my work that I offer for sale.

Sunday was a beautiful Fall day here in central North Carolina. Turnout was steady, interested, and interesting. There are always good questions and comments from visitors. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from the encounters.

The days in between the two weekends are like none other throughout the year for me – maybe something like the week between Christmas and New Year’s for folks who work in an office. I know some work places just shut down during Holiday Week, others work with a reduced staff. No matter, it’s rarely very productive. 

For me, it’s not a week when I start something new so there's a bit of idleness and waiting to the days. It is a week when I think about my work in ways I don’t always think about it. The financial comes into play here, as well as deeper and darker questions concerning value and worth of the work, of me, of my path in this life.

Inevitably, a sense of melancholy creeps into the equation. And I try to counter that with thoughts of future projects, new directions, new resolutions. 

Just this morning I got a chance to look, only for a second time, at the Spain and Portugal contact sheets. Narrowing down my choices for gum printing. Also trolling though some other work from the past year. 

The thought of being back in the darkroom is growing stronger as the busyness of recent months begins to pass.

X-Ray Machines and The Friends of Film

I’ve been home for just over a couple of weeks after being away for 2 ½ weeks before that in Spain and Portugal. Part family vacation, part working tour of the two countries, travelling 2000 km with my wife and two children south from Madrid to Granada then west to Portugal before flying back out of Madrid 17 days later.

The "children" are adults in their 20s living elsewhere. Getting all four of us in the same place at the same time for something other than a funeral gets harder every year. The ostensible tag on this trip was to celebrate our 30th Anniversary on Sept. 2 as a married couple. We wanted to do something extraordinary, maybe to express how extraordinary it is to celebrate thirty years together!

Lots of film went on the trip!

Our daughter Zoe is a photographer in her own right. She works with color and Instax films. Check out her site here.

From my stack, 17 rolls of Kodak Tri X and Ilford FP4 came back exposed. One a day on average. Which is not the way it goes.

So far I’ve processed all the film and made contact sheets of each roll. And last night for the first time, I went through them with a loupe and a pen, over the light box, marking images of interest. 50 in the first round. Of those, 15 or 20 are potential gums!

Going through airports with film is always a circus. It seems every airport and every security guard has his or her own take on what to do with film at the security station. Some are willing to bypass the x-ray machine and simply do a hand check. They are the true friends of film. Then there are the other officers who are not friends of film.

Film should never be transported in checked bags because those x-ray machines are a lot more powerful than the ones used to check your carry-ons.

Over the years, those carry-on machines have gotten safer for film. I think the signs say film under 800 ISO is safe. Having encountered officers over the years who are not friends of film, I know that sending a roll of Tri-X 400 film through the machine doesn’t fog film like it did years ago. But then again, I still have a few lead lined bags for placing film in to shield the film from the x-rays. Can you imagine going through security in this day and age with a lead bag?

On the other hand, I still worry about the cumulative effect of the same roll of film passing through one airport x-ray machine after another. This trip, involved several connecting flights and a couple of layovers. All in all, we passed through security 8 times! So I like to ask before putting my film through the machine. There's a good chance one of the Friends will be there to hand check if you ask.

The remains of the day!

More Backyard Flowers

Sunflower

I dropped off the framed flower prints at the gallery a week ago. The work went up that day and the opening reception was last Friday night. I was really pleased with the turnout. Not only did I see loyal clients and friends, but the reception was coupled with an annual event at the FRANK gallery called Rubbish 2 Runway.

R2R is a fashion (actually the word used is Trashion) show displaying designer clothing made entirely from recycled material. That event draws a more diverse group of people to the gallery than a typical art opening – younger and hipper, for one. The response so far has been really positive.

Tulip-a

Tulip-b

Physically, the prints are small-ish. 9 x 12 inches is as big as they get, I think. They frame out to around 20 x 24 inches. I like the look and feel (not in-hand but in sentiment) of a small print. There’s an intimacy it engenders that a larger sized print could never accomplish.

But I don’t make many of them. They take as much time and nearly as much effort and expense to produce as large prints but the law of the jungle says pricing is generally proportional to size. So from my perspective, as someone who does this with the intention of offering work for sale, the ROI isn’t worth it most of the time.

But in the case of flowers, I make an exception. First of all, the subject matter is quite content to remain small where a grand vista might demand a larger print. But thinking about it now as I write, perhaps the intentionality of this particular series of prints as I alluded in the last post, had more to do with small and intimate.

There are 14 prints in all.

Among them are 5 “pairs” of prints. By a pair, I mean two prints made from the same negative that are at the same time unique in look and character. It’s virtually impossible to make two gum prints look the same, at least the way I make them. I guess that makes the pairs more like fraternal twins. The product of the same parent but quite unique in character.

Amaryllis

The show runs through October 5. I hope those of you close enough to stop by will get a chance to see the work.

Backyard Flowers

The backyard flowers exhibit I mentioned the other day gets hung on Monday, Oct. 8 but the seed of the show was planted more than 15 years ago while working on a project with a dear friend, now deceased. Frank was an ethno-botanist by training and a enlightened teacher by inclination. Always on the move, a nomad in search of the ineffable while on a physical quest to meet a member of every plant family on the face of the earth. For 15 years, he called our home his "East Coast home." Sometimes he stayed for months at a time, other times for a weekend drive-by on his way to some plant gathering.

Echinacea 3-a

For a couple of years starting in the mid- to late 90s, we walked our 2½ acres of land we call Woods Edge. We were looking for and  identifying the plants living on the land. In all, we came up with a list of over 100 species!

In fairness, I should have written "Frank identified the plants." I’ve always had trouble discerning the minute differences in plants that’s necessary to accurately name them. And even if I had such a penchant, I doubt I could have ever remembered them.

The possibility of absorbing and retaining thousands of common and Latin names was never in the cards. So on our walks I recorded each plant in a notebook and then back at the house researched as many taxonomical details as Frank was confident in certifying.

All of which is to say, I’m not the botanist type. But I do have a life-long affinity for plants.

Magnolia

My particular interest in that earlier project was not photographic but revolved instead around the role of the plants in relation to the land they live on as well as their usefulness to me. I was experimenting with making oils, tinctures, spagyrics, meads, and more – attempting to take in the whole panoply of plant uses.

The last time I was with Frank was five years ago this past August. During that visit I wanted to tell him about a photo project I had just begun, photographing the plants on the list that we’d created years earlier. But at that point I only had a few images to show him so instead, I decided to wait for some future visit when the project was farther along.

Regrettably, I never had the opportunity to do that. He died unexpectedly two weeks later in August of 2009. In an effort to honor and advance his work, family members, both by birth and by choice, formed a non-profit organization. If you’re interested, check out the Plants and Healers website.

The shock of his death set the project back for a few years. The bulk of the photographs in the exhibit were made in the past two years and all but two of the gum prints in the show have been printed in the past 6 months.

Amanita

Sizing time!

For the past week and a half, work on the flower show has had to share time with sizing the paper that I’ll be printing on in the coming year. It’s a multi-day process that involves soaking sheets of paper in a vat of warmed gelatin and then hanging to dry each day. I wrote about sizing in some detail last year in a post. Like the gum process, sizing is a slow, day-by-day, layer-by-layer process.

This year I’m sizing 96 sheets in all. I began more than a week ago by pre-shrinking each batch in hot water -- I want to make sure the paper is as small as it’s ever going to be before I start printing with it later in the year. 

Then for the next 6 days I coated 48 sheets of paper per day, three times each, in a large metal pan filled with 8 gallons of heated gelatin to soak the paper. Each batch is then hung to dry in my screen porch.

The final step is hardening the surface of the multi-layered gelatin paper. There are a couple of options out there for hardening. I use formaldehyde. 

As of yesterday afternoon, the annual ritual of paper sizing has come to an end for another year!