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Vaughn

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Last Night in Chile (Santiago from the hostel's rooftop patio.)
5x7 negative, 180mm lens, FP4+ at 100 ISO, f32 at 10 minutes, developed in PyroCat-HD.
Platinum/palladium print from the camera negative, COT320, warm Potassium oxalate developer (~105F)
Coating: start with a rod, finish with brush

My two boys had hit the town for the night. I was recovering from a month of crazy travels with them, driving a silly mini-minivan with a rooftop tent -- starting in the far south in Punta Arenas and camping our way north thru southern Chile and Argentina. My boys were 22, I was three times their age, and no, I could not keep up with them hiking up mountains in Patagonia...I'll blame the 30-pound camera pack and the 60 extra pounds around the middle. This was 4 years ago -- got rid of the pounds, still use the camera.

I made two images during daylight, using the 210mm lens and a red filter (as a non-neutral density filter) with exposures at f64 at 10 seconds. The night image was made just after dark, waiting for a few lights to come on in the apt buildings in the far back. This is mid-January, so very long days and it was after 11pm by the time I took the night image.
Printing the image took a light touch to keep the separation between the far back palm and the sky and hills behind it. No dodging/burning done.

A little different subject for me, but I had 4 sheets of unexposed film in my film holders and it no sense going back to the USA with them that way!
 

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koraks

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Beautiful print, @Rolleiflexible. Yes, high key is one of the major challenges of digital negatives. With pigment processes, it gets even harder!
Don't hesitate to make a thread about the press building project. I'd love to follow your progress on it and I'm sure it would make a valuable resource for future builders as well. This sort of thing may kindle the interest in the photomechanical processes some more!

@Vaughn I vaguely recall seeing that image before...? But I didn't recall the story to go with it. For me, that's what brings such an image alive - the context. Somehow reminds me of that series Greenspun did on Photo.net when the Internet was still young ("Travels with Samantha"). Photographically not necessarily stellar (although decent at times), but as a mixed media piece, it made an impression. Not to say your prints is photographically uninteresting of course!
 

Rolleiflexible

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I finally feel as if I'm getting close to making the kallitype process work for me with human subjects. Here's a photo I made of Melanie when we lived in Boca Raton ten years ago. I have a huge catalog of nudes -- might need to look back and reprint a few more as kallitypes.

 

fgorga

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Wonderful print both technically and artistically.

I (who is almost 70) was chatting with a group of fairly young (20s & 30s) photographers yesterday about the fact that if you are not, at first, making 'mistakes' as you proceed with any creative endeavor then you are not learning and progressing. This is often not obvious to those raised in the era of instant everything.
 

Rolleiflexible

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Patrick Robert James said:
Pretty impressive what you are wringing out of those Kallitypes Sanders.
Click to expand...

Thank you, both of you.

It’s taken me three years to get to this point. And I still have work to do. I think of the big platinum prints that Mapplethorpe made, and marvel at how he made them. (Without benefit of digital negatives!) But now I am beginning to realize that part of the impact of those prints was their scale. Not only because they were big (really big) but also because the textures (paper texture, and how the metals sit on it) smooth out somewhat in a bigger print.

If you’ve not seen it (I saw it at the Guggenheim’s Mapplethorpe retrospective ages ago — it’s what piqued my interest in working with platinum), here’s a reproduction of his “Ken Moody and Robert Sherman (1984),” a 22x25-inch platinum print:
 

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NedL

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Here's a similar idea to that "build-a-press" that I came across yesterday. They provide files for a laser cutter. Since it's all wood, it's not intended to last forever, but they say it will make some 1000's of prints.

Provisional Press
 

KYsailor

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Sanders,

Beautiful print and subject...
I agree with your thoughts about scale. I saw an Irving Penn exhibition at the Frick in Pittsburgh and was really taken with the impact of his work displayed at larger scales. The prints (inkjet) that I have made at fairly large scale - 16 X 20 are the ones I like best, and have ended up framed in my office. I really need to think about larger kallitypes, so far I have only made prints less than 8X10... maybe next year after the holidays.

Dave
 

Vaughn

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5.5"x14" Platinum/palladium print
Checkerboard area of Zion National Park, 2019

This is an image I had wanted to make during my Artist-in-residence in Zion in 2018, but I doubted my ability to get the 11x14 to this spot at the time (heart issues). I decided not be be disappointed with the haze and the resulting lighting, and instead go with it and use it instead.

I guess I was too excited about the image at the time to write my usual notes about the image. But I would have used a 360mm Fuji W lens with FP4+ (PyroCat HD developer), using a modified darkslide to get two 5,5 x14 images on a single sheet of 11x14. There is a black dot (probably a bit of rust perhaps) on the print -- fortunately not on the next print. What's fun and cannot be seen on your screen are three or four bighorn sheep on the rocks on the right -- hard to see on the actual print without a magnifier.
 

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Vaughn

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Thanks, all! I was just was working with the file of this image, so you get stuck with another image. I seem to like photographing Redwood in pairs, so another Two Redwoods for you. This a 5x7 platinum/palladium print from a 5x7 negative.

Taken on a long day hike with friends many years ago (camera was stolen in 1995, so before then -- have replaced camera relatively recently).

Two Redwoods, Emerald Creek Drainage
Redwood National Park
 

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KYsailor

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Vaughn, This is a wonderful print both the composition and the printing - a naïve question: did you tone it to obtain that ( to my eye) light sepia or is that the way Pt/Pl just looks on that particular paper/chemical combination. I always thought it was more neutral.

Dave
 

Vaughn

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I can not claim that the image is exactly the same color as on your screen, but it is warm -- I develop in warm (100 to 105F) Potassium oxalate which will yield a warmer print than with cold PO -- and much, much warmer than Ammonium citrate.

And thanks to all who appreciate the image. The scale is difficult to judge -- the two redwoods are seen starting about 20 feet above ground level as the the slope is steep, and the diameter of the trees where we see them rising out of the rhodies is probably anywhere from 12 to 15 feet. Below is an 8x10 pt/pd of my boys (6 yrs old) and a redwood for size comparison. Not a great reproduction of color or print quality
 

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jeffreyg

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This was from an old negative that I revisited and enlarged and printed Saturday.
Original negative: Ilford Delta 400 120
Camera: Hasselblad with 80mm lens, tripod mounted and stopped down but settings not recorded
Location: somewhere in Germany
enlarged on to Pictorico Premium and cropped to be a horizontal
printed with my platinum/palladium/gold recipe on Arches Platine


 

Rolleiflexible

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Vaughn said:
I can not claim that the image is exactly the same color as on your screen, but it is warm -- I develop in warm (100 to 105F) Potassium oxalate which will yield a warmer print than with cold PO -- and much, much warmer than Ammonium citrate.
Click to expand...

My experience, in toning kallitypes with platinum, is that warmth can vary — I do not always get uniform results, even when using the same developer. I would be interested in knowing whether others see variations as well, whether in straight pt prints or in pt-toned prints.
 

Vaughn

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I use a palladium to platinum ratio of 2:1 (one third platinum) and use Cot320 paper. That is what I like about alt processes...lots of possibilities to control color, contrast, etc...and lots of way to mess up, too!
 

Rolleiflexible

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awty said:
View attachment 355103

Vandyke Brown print on 11 X 14 Berger 160 COT.
Sun exposure for 8 minutes contact print
24 X30 XRAY FILM IN d76
German made 1890 24 x 30 view camera.
Fuji 250mm lens
Click to expand...

Paul, I am slow to comment but I really love this print -- it makes me think that maybe I should take a dive into Van Dyck prints. Did you use any toning agents, or was this a straight VDB print?
 

awty

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Rolleiflexible said:
Paul, I am slow to comment but I really love this print -- it makes me think that maybe I should take a dive into Van Dyck prints. Did you use any toning agents, or was this a straight VDB print?
Click to expand...

Thanks. No toning, they seem go dark purplely using the Berger paper while drying. Nothing exacting in my process.
VDB is easy peasey, you probably already have the chemistry.
Gold theo toner works well if you want something even deeper P/P type of tone.
 
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Vaughn

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A different take on "Tunnel View" in Yosemite National Park -- a fun image made a few years back. I drove up to the tunnel from Yosemite Valley around midnight in February and set the camera up its far entrance. I was in the middle of the road and I did have to move the 8x10 out of the way one or two times...taking note where my tripod 'holes' were. Fortunately in the quiet of the night, I could hear tires on the roadway behind me a couple minutes before the vehicle would arrive. The tire tracks from the wet snowy conditions added to the image...sometimes it is timing, most of the time, luck.

Wawona Tunnel, Yosemite National Park
Platinum/palladium print.
 

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Rolleiflexible

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I goofed a print today but it came out unexpectedly well. I use a vacuum frame under a UV light array. Today, I turned the light and vacuum pump on at the same time, leaving the negative loose on the paper for the first part of the exposure. Surprisingly, the faces in the print turned out sharp, while blurring the bodies a bit. I'm attaching the print here -- I don't think this is a reproducible effect but it was an interesting result this time.
 

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