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12/15/2003 Entry: "another manic Monday"

Monday's are bad enough with facing five hundred or so pages waiting to be scanned for next semester. Yes, it's started already and will only get worse until about the middle of March, if I'm lucky. I took a few minutes to scan a couple of Van Dyke prints and the gum over cyanotype attempt I printed last night.

I'll definitley have another go at the fish after I do some tweaking of the digital negatives in Photoshop. Things are kind of smooshed towards the shadows, with none of the highlight detail coming through.

The Van Dykes were my first shot at this process with the new UV printer. It's still difficult to judge exposure by examination with this new light source. Both of these came out on the well done side initially. A few minutes soaking in a bath of very dilute selenium toner bleached them back to an acceptable range with the side benefit of bringing out more detail in the highlight to midtone range.

Several models are lined up to play with some more light painting experiments after the holiday craziness subsides. Looking over the spectral output of a tungsten lamp, it may be possible to do some IR light painting as well as regular b/w. The exact exposure will take some experimentation and testing but I don't see why it can't be done.