The Östringen Camera Fair ...
This Saturday the local camera club had the annual camera fair. This is a kind of exciting event if you are interested in old cameras. You can buy cameras which are more than a hundred years old. A lot of traditional stuff, things you probably have never seen and never will see again and almost no digital cameras. They somehow seem not to be the best choice when it comes to collectible items. Not yet.
I took the opportunity to buy what I always buy at the camera fair ... lens caps for my Nikon lenses. I do not know why, but I loose one or two of those caps every year. Something that never happens with a pinhole camera. I do not know how they get lost but at the end of the day I realize - they had disappeared. That is always a shock for my Continuous Creation Theory. You may be interested in this not so serious theory. It says that matter is created continuously. And it contradicts somehow the principle of conservation of energy. You may ask for a prove of this theory? Well that's an easy one, look into the glove compartment of your car and you will see that matter is created all the time out of nothing. But maybe it is created out of my lost lens caps ...
The camera fair took place in a sports hall of the local school center. There is also a stage which was used as a studio. There was a photographer who set up some studio flashes, and there were some models around and visitors of the fair could sign up for an hour of photographing with their own cameras using that studio flash system. Well nothing for my pinhole camera, so I decided to take the other direction, towards the camera fair. I used my 8×10" pinhole camera with some Fomapan 100. This has a reciprocity failure which allowed for a really long exposure time. The above image shows 100 minutes of the Östringen camera fair. What you see is a straight print on Ilford MG IV RC.
Week 12: The Dung Fork ...
These are two images which I photographed last year, but never found the right time to print them. What a fault. But sometimes the good things need their time to grow. I did these on Kentmere Kentona with SE5Lith and Ω-lith. What I found in the fixing bath when I switched on the lights in the darkroom really pleased me from the first second on. It was one of those Wow situations in the darkroom when you not really await something great to happen. For this image, the little bit of light in the top left corner makes it for me. It produces some kind of magic. Well, enough excitement from my side, maybe you will find it totally boring and maybe you are right. Who knows.
The image on the right shows the outside of a stable window with lots of old tools. Also nice in my opinion, but for me not nearly as absorbing as the dung fork image.
The Dung Fork (revisited) ...
This is another try on the dung fork. Yesterday evening (night might be the better word - yawn) I took out the dung fork negative again and did some kallitypes. This is the same negative I used for this weeks lith print. It is a bit thin, so I was afraid that I might have not enough contrast for kallitypes. But thanks to the Tanol film developer (which is a staining developer) the contrast came out OK with a little bit of dichromate in the developer. So here is a bit of a different interpretation of the the negative. Not as contrasty as the lith print. Unfortunately I can not show you the nice structure of the paper, it is Arches Platinum, a paper I like very much because it needs no sizing and other special handling. Just put the emulsion on, let it dry and print.
Week 13: Lenswork ...
Lenswork is the only photographic magazine that I read regularly. And it is the best magazine about photography that I know of. Since my subscription started I collected 40 issues so far. And here you see all of them.
What I like about Lenswork is, that it is not about cameras, lenses and other equipment. It is about photographers and their art and about craft. The print quality can rival the print quality of every photographic book that I have seen. Give it a try, visit their web site, you won't regret it.
This image is done with the rsph810 on HP5+ which I developed in replenished XTOL. I then decided to use some paper I have still left, but do not usually use and probably will not buy again. Not because it is a bad paper, but because I do not want to stick with too many different papers and I like other papers more. It is contact printed on Fomabrom 112 using Wolfgang Moerschs SE2 Warmtone. I bleached the highlights a bit and did a sulfur toning.
There are no side prints this week. Well I could show a failure to redevelop this paper in lith. But I will show this probably in another post together with a redevelopment that looks better (but still has to be done).
Week 14: Where I Come From ...
To know your way through your life is as much knowing where you go to as it is knowing where you come from.
This is where I come from. A small village in palatinate forest enclosed by seven hills in the valley of Merzalb creek. This is a view over the village as seen through a window of castle Gräfenstein which is next to Merzalben on one of the hills.
I was there on Easter Monday (which is a public holiday in Germany). I hoped to have light overcast, but when I arrived at the castle the sun came out producing some hard contrasts. Usually you do not see too many people up there, but boy, it was crowded. There were some families with their kids seeking for easter eggs. And then there was this Dutch hiking group. I do not speak Dutch, but I love the sound of that language. Well, I assume I met around 50 people that morning.
What you see is a kallitype on Arches Platine paper, the lower left corner shows the shadow of the camera and the dark slide.
Week 15: Gräfenstein Castle ...
So here is another kallitype from Gräfenstein Castle. I did this while a grandpa standing behind the wall on the left was taking a photograph of his grandson standing behind the wall on the right. It took them my 16 seconds exposure time to manage this and I just took my chance.
Just a side note. This image has a different color than the kallitype of last week. That is because this one was put into my dry press at around 80°C for some time. That changes the appearance of the print and gives it a bit colder tone.
Week 16: Yucca (kallitype) ...
So once again the Yucca. Earlier in the year I participated in the APUG alt print exchange where people send around prints done with alternative printing methods, such as vdb, pt/pd, cyanotype, kallitype or what ever. I sent kallitypes of the Yucca negative which I did on Arches Platine. And - what a surprise - I also did one print for myself.
Now the next chapter of the story. The weekend before Easter I met with a few people in Colone, it was an APUG German gathering and a really nice meeting. We spent hours looking at beautiful photographs which the participants shared with each other. And obviously there was also some chatting about darkroom issues. Well, one of the guys I met there was Wolfgang Moersch, you know the wizard who makes these wonderful lith developer I mostly use. I was once in a kallitype printing workshop that he did and that gave me a go in alternative printing techniques. He is very responsive if you have questions (be it via email or via phone) and I used his expertise a lot. So I brought that kallitype as a gift for him.
Now back home again I realized "Hey, that was my last kallitype of that negative, now I have not a single copy for myself", so I printed that negative again and now that I printed it again, why not show it here on my little blog. Here it is, the Yucca again, this time as a kallitype. Hope you like that one too.
As a side note, I printed it twice, one with the normal sodium citrate developer, and one with the sodium citrate developer and 1 ml of sodium dichromate (not something you want to mix a drink out of it) to have a bit more contrast. And now I am in a dilemma (kind of), which one do I like more? Maybe a sign that non of the two is quite right. So today I am an I-like-contrast-guy and prefer the one developed in the dichromate developer. Maybe I will change my mind tomorrow.