Cyano Time II

 

I was clearing out my darkroom storage area this morning when I found some Cyanotype paper which I had prepared about 6 weeks ago, so before throwing it out I thought I'd do a couple of quick test prints as the sun was out. These are the results of a sixteen minute exposure under our winter sun, then tea toned immediately after washing. 

Classroom demo pic

Buddha reclaimed - Silver Gelatin print, split toned

Thought I'd share the result of a toning demonstration that I did for my advanced darkroom printing class yesterday. The original image was shot using my Nikon D300s and after carrying out some photoshop adjustments to match my pre-visualised outcome, an inkjet transparency 'digital negative' was created from the photograph. This was used to produce a black and white contact print on a sheet of my dwindling supply of Agfa Multicontrast Fibre-based paper in the darkroom.

The resulting image was split toned using a combination of sepia and blue toners. Using the sepia toner first, I only gave the print a very slight and partial bleach keeping a close eye on the highlights as the bleach took effect. This resulted in only the highlight areas being toned sepia with the more dense areas of the print remaining relatively unaffected. After the sepia toning phase had been completed, the print was taken from the final wash and placed into the blue toner which altered the darker mid tones and shadows giving a much cooler feel to those areas of the image. The pic above is a scan of the print straight off the drying rack. I had considered doing some additional hand coloring as part of another demo, but I quite like the result and may leave it as is. 

Pic of the week

                             Wat Po, Bangkok - Polaroid triptych

This week, another polaroid triptych from the edit for my upcoming Polaroid book. 

Pic of the week

Angkor Wat, Cambodia - Polaroid triptych (click to see enlarged version)

OK, so it has been a while and many things have happened, photographically speaking, since my last post. Time to take this blog more seriously and be more active here, particularly whilst I rebuild my website. I'm using a Lightroom plug-in called the Turning Gate, which seemed like a good idea at the time. But after running into problems editing content in pages that are added to the provided template and getting no support or help from the creator/distributor despite having paid for their product, I wonder whether I made the right choice.