The feed of updates to look at what the light did now
This sequence is my heart laid bare and how! Some will realize that it is done for the love of God. Most will think it sentimental and for the love of the flesh. But that I cannot help. Maybe it will be beautiful to a few borderline cases and who because of the sequence will realize for the first time that a love of God can grow out of a love for the flesh . - Minor White, from Memorable Fancies ,…
Did a trial run of pyro developing using Pyrocat HD on some 4x5 negatives today. Notes: HP5+, exposed at ~ASA 320 Developing temp: 72˚F Presoak: 5m Pyrocat formula: 2:2:100 (9ml A - 9ml B - 450ml water) Agitation (“minimal”): 60 seconds, followed by 5 inversions every 3 minutes Developing time: 28m (50% increase from normal agitation version) - CI 0.8 Water stop bath, 2m Ilford Rapid Fix, 9:1, 5m,…
I made a Lightroom preset to help visualize what I might get from a cyanotype of my digital files. Maybe someone else might find it useful, so here it is .
Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, “ Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the…
Something that you feel will find its own form A list written by Jack Kerouac, allegedly tacked to the wall in Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before he wrote “ Howl”: 1 Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2 Submissive to everything, open, listening 3 Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4 Be in love with yr life 5 Something that you feel…
Postscript And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on…
Drop count/paper coating cheat sheet 1 drop per 2 square inches 20 drops = 1 ml 4 x 5 inch print = 10 drops = 1/2 ml (0.3-0.4 ml using a glass rod) 8 x 10 inch print = 40 drops = 2 ml (1.5 ml with glass rod)
The poignancy of the photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred. ALLEN GINSBERG
Cyanotype Toning formulas I’ve been working with cyanotype toning baths awhile now, and while I haven’t figured out which ones work best or which one(s) I prefer, I have some basic approaches I’ve locked down. Bleaching/redevelopment: For the most part, I prefer the effects you get when you first bleach back the print, either for a short while (just until the shadows go from blue to purple,…
Caffenol formulas These are the Caffenol formulas I’m currently using for both film and paper developing. The ingredients should be dissolved one at a time in half the final volume of water, then the remainder of water added. Reagent g per liter Na 2 CO 3 54g Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C) 16g KBr ( for 400 speed films or higher ) 1g Instant coffee 40g Process: 15m development at 68F . Paper (mostly…
I can never remember how much area each format of film covers, which is a useful bit of information to have when you are keeping track of how many “ rolls” you’ve run through a batch of chemicals ( monobath , for example). So here it is: 1 roll 36 exposure 35mm film = 1 roll 120 film = 4 sheets 4x5 film = 1 sheet 8x10 film
I’ve been using Cinestill D96 Monobath for black and white film developing recently. I still think Caffenol is the better option in terms of environmental safety, but the convenience and speed of a monobath can’t be beat: 8 minutes to develop and fix film, followed by 3 quick rinses and a short soak in distilled water/rinse-aid and you are done. It’s temperature-sensitive, so you need to warm it…
A photograph or a collection of photographs that ignores its usual objective is equally perverted. Perverted photography doesn’t sell a product or communicate a message. It’s not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It’s layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic. - Torbjørn Rødland
I need to get back to this blog, particularly posts where I actually write things . I spend a fair bit of time keeping notes on photographic processes I am trying to get a handle on, with the end goal of locking down a reliable method, and to create ‘ cheat sheets’ to have handy when I return to them. But most of the time these notes end up unorganized and unarticulated (oftentimes I go back to…
In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the coexistence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. D. W. Winnicott
Provincetown, MA . August, 2018. Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this:…
Sentences on Photography by Torbjørn Rødland The muteness of a photograph matters as much as its ability to speak. The juxtaposition of photographs matters as much as the muteness of each. All photography flattens. Objectification is inescapable. Photography cannot secure the integrity of its subject any more than it can satisfy the need to touch or taste. Good ideas are easily bungled. Banal…
So this blog has its first confirmed reader, which means I ought to post more regularly again. Which I will do soon. Lots of things cooking these days, especially in the cyanotype arena.
Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we…
dehisce de·hisce | -ˈhis dehisced; dehiscing intransitive verb to split along a natural line also : to discharge contents by so splitting Ex: “ seedpods dehiscing at maturity”
There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time’s passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it. Mark Doty / Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
I am no longer sure, although once I was, that we can improve the world with a photograph. However I’m still convinced that bad photographs make it worse. Ferdinando Scianna
Photographer Alice Zoo, on accidents: An ongoing fear of mine is that my most successful projects come about by accident: that they are a last resort, or an experiment, or a mistake of some kind, that I end up following through with and come to find that they’re truer or more authentic-seeming than my more intentional or carefully-conceived work. For example: when I had the idea for my most recent…
Earlier this year, I did a “ The Setup”/Usesthis interview, discussing all the tools I like to use. It was fun to do, especially since it is one of my favorite blogs to read. I’ve adopted loads of tools of all kinds myself having read about them there. link
Honored to have a print up in the Bakery Photo charity auction again this year, with that image from my Life at Waist Level series. So many great images in the show, looking forward to getting up to Portland, ME to see them all in person soon.
So I shot my first zone plate images the other day, using the Pentax 67 zone plate cap (f64) that I made using a Pinhole Resource zone plate. For fun and for reference, I shot lensed images alongside each shot, using the 110mm 2.5 lens. The camera was mounted on a tripod and the zone plate exposure was 8-Mississippis long (using Pinhole Assist as a meter). The film was Ilford HP5 , developed in…
There is an old lyric that says “ the brushwood we gather and tie it together, it makes a hat. Pull it apart, a field once again.” Such is a way of thinking in old Japan, one finds beauty not in the substance itself, but in the weave of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates…. A noctilucent jewel which exudes its glow and color in the dark, and loses its beauty…
The act of making a photograph is challenged constantly by the seduction of making a “ nice picture,” instead of the purpose of capturing the “ spirit” of the subject and expressing my vision through photography. For me, the word “ spirit” may also be replaced by the word “ life.” To hold myself at the very edge of admiring the beauty of a subject before falling into that seduction, and still…
Lloyd Squires, owner of Myer’s Bagels in Burlington, VT , is my new baking hero: Link: A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont’s ‘ best’ bagel maker
And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women h/t Sarah Hendren
parrhesia - n - (Rhetoric) boldness or frankness of speech; the act of asking forgiveness for speaking in such a way