I went over to David’s house today to try my hand at printing cyanotypes. I’ve done lith printing many times, but it requires a proper darkroom setup (which I don’t have). David promised me that cyanotypes were easy and didn’t need a darkroom. Plus some of his samples were quite impressive.
I can report that cyanotypes are, in fact, easy. This may be due partly to the technique and also partly to David already having all the gear set up in his house to do it!
Here’s the first one I did, printed on coated Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta. Yeah, it’s inkjet paper, but we coated it anyway to see how it would work.
First Beach, WA
This was the most successful of the three prints I did. The gloss is actually very nice. What you can’t see, however, is how the inkjet coating on the paper started to crack in the water. It doesn’t look bad in the image area, but it’s very noticeable around the edges. Oh well.
Here’s the second image, on Canson watercolour paper:
Racetrack, Death Valley National Park, CA
This worked out reasonably well too. My B&W conversions thus far have not really made the bird tracks show up well, but with how the cyanotype process handles highlights I’m really pleased with this variation. I’m not wild about how the mountains turned out though. That’s the beauty of digital negatives: I can go back and tweak the negative and try again.
Here’s the third image. It didn’t work at all:
Iceberg, Antarctica
I messed up the coating on this pretty badly. That’s what caused all the stripes you see in the image. We also pushed the water too close to black and lost some of the really nice reflections of the ice. I do find it rather amusing that I went through all this work to get a blue ice photo when the original was blue to begin with!
Kentmere Kentona Fineprint VC paper in Rollei Vintage Creative developer. 1:1:16 ratio, 24 sec. @ f/11 exposure, 13:01 development.
One of the best photography classes I’ve ever taken is Lith Printing with Gina White at Photographic Center Northwest. Lith printing is just plain fun. Yeah, you have to develop your prints for a LOT longer than a regular gelatin silver print, but when the shadows start to develop and things start happening fast it’s just crazy cool.
On Thursday night Gina invited me to crash her current lith class as a thank you for providing some lith developer at the last minute for the class to use. I jumped on the opportunity to try something I’ve only done once before: lith printing from a digital negative.
The image above should be familiar, as it’s the shot from First Beach last weekend. I have very little digital negative experience, so I gambled and printed two versions of the image on Pictorico OHP. One was a straight inverted image with no curve applied, and the second had a digital negative curve for some random Epson printer applied. It only took one test print in the darkroom to realize the one with the curve was the winner.
There’s definitely a different quality to a lith print when the starting image was a digital negative. I find the shadows are even more chunky than with a regular negative, and I suspect this has to do with the relative coarseness of the ink when compared to silver particles on film. The other big difference is how much light the OHP lets through: it’s a crazy amount. My exposure time was 24 seconds at f/11. And when you lith print you expose 4x over what you would for a regular gelatin silver print. CRAZY. And a huge advantage when doing lith, as it helps avoid 4 minute exposure! The development time is long enough already!
It’s a very different feeling image compared to the original, but I have to say I like it. I needed about another 20 minutes to really lock in the development time to bring out a few more of the shadow details, but it’s not bad at all for a first try.
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8L IS II. 88mm, ISO 100, 1 sec. @ f/11.
The last three times I’ve been to the Hoh rainforest I’ve taken my camera and David’s 14mm lens and nothing else. That’s resulted in exactly one worthwhile shot.
Today I tried something different and took my camera with the 70-200mm. I was going to bring my whole camera bag, but… it was raining. A lot. So I took an umbrella-ella-ella instead.
There really wasn’t much to shoot, so we resorted to standing around and playing with texture and patterns. We must have looked pretty silly! All three of us would stand somewhere, press our cameras up to our nose, and start waving them around in the air.
Each of us came away with at least one image that we really liked though. Mine is above. From a processing standpoint, the neat part about this image is that all the edits were done using Paddy for Lightroom and a BCF2000. Fun!
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8L IS II. 70mm, ISO 50, 2 sec. @ f/32.
We spent early Saturday morning shooting at Ruby Beach. In the rain, of course. We’ve been to Ruby twice before, and both times I wasn’t super impressed (although I did get a sweet self-portrait on the first visit).
This time was different.
As soon as we got to the beach I noticed an odd part of sand where wave water washed back out to the ocean in an arc. I immediately saw a composition with the arc in a relatively wide crop. I set up my tripod and fired away. At one point a leaf made a guest appearance on the left, and I knew I had my image. I managed to squeeze off four shots before a wave came in and the leaf was gone.
I didn’t even have to get back to the room to know I had my image for the day. The rest of the beach shooting was just absent-minded screwing around.
The trouble with this image is that it’s completely pointless to view it on a computer monitor. The leaf is actually green, but you can’t really tell that. There’s film grain across all the smooth areas that brings a lovely texture to the image, but you can’t really see that either. It’s a shot that just demands to be printed, and I’ll do so as soon as I get home.
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8L IS II. 200mm, ISO 3200, 1/60 sec. @ f/2.8.
Remember how I said yesterday the weather was rainy and windy, and that was the forecast good day for the trip? The forecast was right. Today was worse.
When it rains, where do you go? The rainforest of course!
Every time we’ve gone to the Hoh Rainforest I’ve always found the best shooting to be outside the actual park, on the right side of the road at a nice sweeping curve. The left is a field, which isn’t interesting. But the forest on the right is awesome, and in the span of about 1/4 mile presents three very different looks at a rainforest.
Today when we were driving up the road in the rain I was staring blankly out the window when I saw a vine maple peeking out of the forest. Brakes were slammed, David whipped off a k-turn, and I was out of the car standing in the rain. No time for rain hoods, tripods, etc. Crank the ISO, turn on the lens stabilization, and hope for the best. The light was perfect, and I didn’t want to lose it. The result is above.
The challenge of shooting in the Hoh is how incredibly messy the underbrush is. There’s crap everywhere and getting a shot where things stand out is extremely hard. Rather than fight the mess I figured I’d celebrate it, and the light catching off the vine maple makes it stand out just enough from the rest of the forest clutter.
This isn’t my favourite image from the trip, and it still needs some processing work, but it’s definitely one I’m proud of.
(By the way, this image was pre-visualized in B&W. There’s no way it would look good in colour, and post-processing proved it. The colour image is ugly!)
Canon 5D Mark II, 17-40 f/4L. 34mm, ISO 100, 4.0 sec. @ f/6.3.
Another season, another trip to the Washington Coast with Vlad and David. This trip is timed to match low tide with sunrise and sunset. That was the smart part. Of course, we can’t control the weather.
It’s raining. And windy. And today’s forecast was the good day.
Even so we’ve managed to make two highly successful stops. The first was to the Hoh Rainforest, mostly as a scouting trip while we waited for our hotel rooms to get ready. The second was to First Beach for “sunset” (I assume there was one, the clouds completely covered the sky so it’s not like we could actually see it). When we got out of the car I actually said to Dave and Vlad that I was just going to take my point-and-shoot and leave my gear in the car.
They looked at me like I was an idiot.
I took my camera bag.
Anyway, we walked down the beach and it sucked. I couldn’t understand why on earth we were at the stupid place. There were pebbles on the beach and waves. YAWN. And we were walking so far from the car! David just kept grinning and walking.
Then we got to the end of the beach, and I understood. The next 33 minutes was a haze of composing and shooting. I came away with at least three shots that I just love, one of which is shown above.
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 2.8 IS with 1.4x extender. 280mm, ISO 100, 1/30 sec. @ f/8.0.
Today is day six of seven on the trip and it’s the first time I pulled my camera out of my bag.
This hasn’t been much of a photography trip. I brought all my gear with me, but I knew going in that the trip would primarily be about family. Oddly, I haven’t minded, as the scenery (while quite beautiful) just isn’t my cup of tea. The mountains around are impressive, but they don’t have much snow and the trees are just trees. Lakes everywhere, but again, they’re just lakes. I could take photos, but they’d be like everyone else’s photos.
Today, however, was different. We were driving from Canmore, AB to Creston, BC, and went through a forest that burned about two decades ago. Lots and lots of dead trees everywhere looked quite interesting. Even better, there were purple wildflowers everywhere. We looked for a place to pull off, and as luck would have it we pulled into the Marble Canyon parking lot with a few short trails around the river. Wow.
Amusingly, while it was the interplay of the wildflowers and dead trees that made me stop for photos, the ones I liked best were just trees.
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8 IS II. 200mm, ISO 100, 1/500 sec. @ f/2.8.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry I was pretty worried about going to eastern Washington. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come up with a unique view of the classic rolling hills of the Palouse region. One way we tried to get a different perspective on things was to rent a plane and take to the air.
The flight far exceeded my expectations. Not only was our pilot really nice, he did a great job positioning the plane to help us get the shots we wanted. He didn’t even mind spending 10 minutes circling two tractors at work while we shot them from various angles. The result was the above shot, one of my favourites from the trip.
We did learn a few valuable lessons regarding shooting from the air:
Don’t be shy about asking the pilot to move the plane around so you can get your shot. You’re paying for the plane rental, so you control where you go (within ATC limits, of course!)
Make sure you know well in advance the quality of the windows on the plane you’ll be renting. In our case the only window that opened was the passenger’s window, and it was only a tiny port. Vlad and David had to shoot through very scratched plexiglass (and still wound up with some impressive shots).
It was great fun though and we will definitely do it again next year!
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8 IS II. 200mm, ISO 100, 1/200 sec. @ f/4.5.
We were driving down a back road somewhere around Colfax, WA, when I saw a hill. I can’t remember if we were driving at the time, or if we’d stopped to shoot some of the fields, but it didn’t matter. As soon as I saw the hill I smiled and took a picture.
What’s so special about the hill? Well, it reminded me of this shot from the Lemaire Channel in Antacrtica that I took in January 2009:
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8 IS. 95mm, ISO 400, 1/500 sec. @ f/7.1.
I’m not quite sure what it is about that shape but I see it everywhere. In fact, I shot a third copy of it while we were in the air flying over Steptoe Butte. I just didn’t realize it until I was back in the motel room doing image review.
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8 IS II. 95mm, ISO 125, 1/500 sec. @ f/2.8.
Perhaps I should print all three of them and hang them on a wall together!
Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/2.8 IS. 180mm, ISO 200, 1/15 sec. @ f/11. Photo courtesy of Vlad Sadovsky.
Back in February I wrote about the importance of nap time when I was on a trip to the Washington Coast. I was reminded again of the importance of naps during photographic trips again last weekend when we were in the Palouse region.
Friday was a very, very, long day. I was up at 6am and we didn’t get to our motel in Colfax, WA until 12:30am on Saturday morning. With sunrise at around 5:15am that meant a 4:15am wake-up call. Ugh.
Nap time is the only thing that got me through the day. Amusingly I wound up napping on Steptoe Butte twice, exactly 12 hours apart. The above photo is the first nap in the cool morning air at 6:10am. The second nap was in the shadow cast by our car at 6:10pm, when the temperature was around 35C.
