Printing Up a Storm, Darkroom Updates, and More!

 Quite a few things have been going on here since last week's little instructional video made its debut.

First and foremost, the weather outside has been frightful, compressing available shooting time to half-day spurts of creativity. I'm half way into my first and last box of Tri-X 8x10, and so far it has done as expected. Were it not 2x pricier than Ilford HP5+, and a special-order-only product, I may have switched back to Kodak stock for 100% of shooting. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Five more barbershop shots on this Tri-X and it's back to HP5+. I'll miss the bit more speed of TXP (pyrocat hd gives slight loss of speed), but definitely not the price!

Second on my plate is the upcoming Midwest Large Format Asylum Portfolio Review. A funny name for a funny group of large format shooters, but they're all really great guys. I met a large chunk of them last summer at Photostock 2011, and from the looks of things, I may not only be the youngest guy attending this meetup, but I may also be shooting the smallest camera! To add even more pressure to uneasy feeling of showing a bunch of seasoned LF veterans my portfolio, I promised these gentlemen an all-carbon-print portfolio, and darnnit' that's what I'm gonna' give 'em!

While we're still on the topic of carbon printing, I received in the mail a brand new, custom made coating rod from R.D. Specialties out of New York. They're great folks to deal with, and through a little help of the Carbon Transfer Group, started by Sandy King, I was able to find all the information I needed to get just the right size formed rod to coat my own carbon tissues. Fourteen have already successfully coated, five already printed, and with a good twenty* more coated and done by Friday of next week. (* hopeful estimate). For folks out there still scratching their heads about carbon transfer printing, below you'll see an embedded YouTube video that will fully demonstrate the insane amount of time that goes into a simple contact print. Trust me, once you see one in person, it's worth it!

Fourth and finally is some even more funky, out of left field news. I just got in the mail today 100 sheets of Agfa Green Sensitive X-Ray film! That's right, the same kind of film we all got to view our first broken bones on can be used in view cameras to make negatives for contact printing! Since the film is a little more quirky than modern panchromatic (most of our visible spectrum) emulsions, it gives a more early 1900's look, with it's biggest advantage being sheer economy. You're not going to believe it until you see it, so click HERE. Your eyes don't deceive you, this film only costs $0.28/sheet in 8x10!! With my most commonly shot films coming in ~$4/sheet in B&W and ~$12/sheet in color, it's easy to see why giving X-Ray film a try was the next logical step in shooting more 8x10 film. Expect regular updates in this area, I plan on exploring every inch of this wallet-friendly film!

Well that's it, I'm off to the darkroom to carbon print for hours and hours and hours. If I get too bored, don't be surprised if you see YouTube video show up (below) on the carbon print process

Have a great weekend and long live film!

Update on Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 10:17PM by Mat Marrash

Well here it is, I got bored, and just as promised, a little video from today's carbon transfer printing session! For the record, it was a great overall printing day, I went 7/9 on prints, the other 2 not even making it to the sensitizing stage as the carbon tissue mysteriously cracked while drying.

More videos like this to follow in the coming weeks!

Another Summer of Film, Another Project!

Hello all you film shooters out there. It's only been a little over a month since The 52 Project ended, and boy did it ever end with a bang! There was a Film Photography Podcast Midwest Meetup AND a gallery show at The University of Findlay Lea Gallery. There were some great folks, lots of film, and a whole mess of fun.

And just so everyone out there can feel the love, here's a look into the FPP Midwest Meetup:

We followed-up this awesome afternoon with a Gallery Show:

 Tough act to follow, right? Well, a little extra thinking lead me to yet another project. Here goes...

The One-A-Day Project

1. One 8x10 picture taken each day.
2. Any subject, any time, any place.
3. Same film, Ilford HP5+
4. Same developer, Pyrocat HD 1:1:100
5. Same paper, Ilford MG IV Fiber 8x10
6. Same paper developer, Dektol 1:2

The basic idea of this project is to get me to shoot the 8x10 regularly, comfortably, and in every conceivable situation. And at the end of each week, I'll head up to the darkroom, develop, and print what I've taken for the week. Pretty easy, right? ;)

Week 1 is already in the can, post coming soon, so stay tuned!

-Keep on shooting film!

The 52 Project, Week 31: Swanson's on Sandusky Street

What started as a quick practice in large format camera setup has suddenly become my most successful 8x10 B&W to date. 0__0 Here's the low-down.

It was about two weeks after my trip to New York, I was bored, starting to feel the winter weather creeping in, and really starting to miss shooting that big 'ole 8x10. There were still many prints to be made, as I was in the early test stages of fine-tuning my Pyrocat HD developing regimen; aka, the initial contact prints looked horrid. For those of you that follow the blog regularly, you can take this post as the big excuse why my posts started to backup throughout December.

So anyway, I had these god-awful contact prints on the cheapest fiber paper known to man, made under darkroom conditions unbeknownst to cause horrendous post exposure fogging ("Doh!"). I was taking them to my good friend Leslie over at Findlay's only photo-related shop, Imagine That! for some peer review. What I love about Leslie is that she's too nice a person to tell a bad photo off, unless you ask her for her honest opinion. Of course, I did just that and got the earful that was needed; my consolation prize was getting to pet with the "shop cat" Schmoop, a monstrous rag doll cat with enough fur to take out an army of allergic soldiers.  With my now low-hanging self-esteem, I sulked back to the car, when I happened to notice Leslie's next door neighboring business for the first time. It was a quaint little '50's style barber shop with a simple everyday scene occurring. I was so struck, I went in to ask Mr. Swanson's permission for a picture while he finished up yet another haircut. There was very little time for the setup and capture to occur before this haircut was over, and daylight was fading fast. This was the perfect opportunity to capture something meaningful with the 8x10.

And here's what I got:

It's great slices of Americana like this that give me hope for the continuance of Mom & Pop shops in the future. ^__^The exposure was quite a long one, 5-6 seconds, with a LOT of faith placed on the busy barber and his patient patron. I needed as much light hitting the film as I could possibly get, so a lot of swing was used to manipulate my depth of field while keeping the lens close to wide open. Only after processing the film did I realize there was MORE than enough light captured, I had in fact created the most dense Pyrocat negative I'd ever seen. >__< Just to get the "crappy" print on RC paper needed a low f-stop and a lot of Grade 0 time on the enlarger. Translation: I ignored protocol and consistency of calibration in order to get a cool shot, much paper would be wasted in obtaining a good print.

All in all, the severely diluted Pyrocat HD came through for me in preserving the highlight detail in the fluorescent bulbs while pulling out plenty of shadow detail towards the back room of the barber shop. No complaints in the image department, except maybe the overall framing (or frame within a framing :p).

When I started printing bigger, 20x24 fiber prints to be exact, you can bet multiple, multiple copies of this print were made. They're all pretty close to one another, with some softer in contrast than others. Dodging and burning gets a little trickier when dealing with split-grade printing; more about that insane process another day. So far, the prints have been doing incredibly well. It's three for three thus far, getting into:

• Art Space Lima's Annual Photo Show
• The Findlay Art League Photo 29 - Winner of Best B&W
• FAVA Biennal Photo Show 

So what was learned from this image?

Something Good: It appears to have an impact favorable to a majority of viewing audiences. Perhaps its the simplicity of the image, or the familiarity of the subject matter. Either way, it's doing quite well in the aesthetics department.

Something Bad: This neg is dense, like 5+ minute print times dense. I'm terrified to use reducer as I've heard horror stories about what it can do to pyro stain. The flip side is this makes a fabulous negative for Platinum/Palladium printing should I ever have enough disposable income to start "printing money".

Something Learned: Judging from the very few images I've taken which include other people, I'm starting to tell that I like environmental portraiture, a lot. Not that head-on portraits without context are a bad thing, I just feel they're a waste of the detail capturing power of 8x10.

Next Week: We're going back down to medium format, for some off-beat fun shots. Don't wanna get too serious for a personal blog. :p