Brown.

In a way, working on our Van Dyke brownprints was easier than the cyanotypes: I was no longer blundering around the darkroom like a dazed and confused idiot, and I could navigate around PhotoShop without constant fear of spontaneous combustion. The actual printing process, however, involved a lot more guesswork and experimentation. We used a seemingly endless array of toners, fixers, and bleaches in the process and ultimately ran out of time. It was a little exasperating, actually. The prints took on a beautiful, rich brown tone when wet, and dried to a washed out and greyish sort of mud color when dry.

For this project, I did a series of cliché verres using feathers plucked out of my pillow. Initially, I aimed to use internegatives for this set, placing the feathers into an enlarger, and projecting the enlarged images directly onto 4×5 film. Unfortunately, because the feathers are so transparent, the film came out too dense, so I ended up scanning the images, and adjusting them to print as the same kind of digital negative I used for the cyanotypes.

I used four internegatives, out of which I got eight images: a pair of positive and negative prints for each feather pattern. One of those pairs was featured at Harold Washington College’s juried art shot over the summer.

It makes me so very sad not knowing when I’ll get to play at being photographer again. I miss spending time in the darkroom. I miss the frustration and the satisfaction of printing my own work. Hopefully, I will get a chance to expand on the tiny bit of knowledge and experience I have. Given the chance, I know that, with time and practice, I can get better results.

~ by immateria on October 23, 2011.