Thursday, March 25, 2004
Missed the big brown UPS truck yesterday by a couple of hours. They tried to deliver the shipment of chemicals I'd ordered from ArtCraft. If we don't hook up today, I'll have to do a "will call" and get the package at their local center. There should be enough toys to mix up about 3 liters of Van Dyke emulsion with enough silver nitrate left to try the albumen process, and concoct a bit of gold toner for experimenting on the albumen and some lith prints.
Plans for the alt-process class final project are starting to come together. I've made a small scale mockup of the accordion book to check out some hinging options and will probably use archival and reversible gummed linen tape. I'm also thinking of increasing the size of the pages to about 11x14 inches. This should give a decent amount of white space around the 8x10 images. Total number of pages and the mix of processes is still undecided. I'll work my way through that as I start printing but expect to end up with a rather random mixture of cyanotype, VDB and gum bichromate. I've done some testing of my large negatives with VDB and cyanotype, and also managed a quick two layer 
gum bichromate print.
This evening, I'm back at school for a lecture by Ann Mandelbaum. I've found very little of her work on the web but the pre-talk blurb sounds interesting, "Ann Mandelbaum's work traverses a precarious edge between still life and nude photography. The slippage between genders that imbues her images belies their original source." Might prove inspiring for another light paint experiment this weekend.
Posted by coldmarble @ 11:18 AM ET [Link] [blab]
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Spring break? Well, the campus was quiet all last week but I was kept busy with work for my alt-process class. I know I've spent too much time in the darkroom when I start referring to being there as work and not play. After eight hours of grinding out 4x5 interpositives from 35mm negatives, my head was starting to spin and my vision was taking longer and longer to adjust from the dim light of the darkroom to the brightness of the lightbox and back again as I checked test strip after test strip.
Close to being finished with the first stage of the game and ready to move on to making the enlarged negatives from the light paint series. I had a scare looking at some of the interpositives I'd made at MICA earlier in the semester. They seemed much darker than what I've churned out lately. I thought I'd have to remake about a dozen of them but tried a test first. I picked the thickest and ugliest one and made a 8x10 negative. It seemed to work out alright when I did a VDB test this morning. I also tested the other end of the scale, with my thinnest interpositive and that worked just as well. I've got about twenty or so negatives to crank out before I start printing for the final project. It'll mean some fast work in the darkroom, as I need accesss to the one and only LF enlarger. Some of the intermediate students are planning to use the school's LF cameras for their projects, so I need to finish my negative production before then.
Posted by coldmarble @ 09:38 AM ET [Link] [blab]
