Double Printing and Toners

Still working a lot, very busy in the studio. I’ve just started some gum bichromate printing, but the first results aren’t worth discussing, so I’ll save it for another post. I’ve made several Van Dyke brown and cyanotype prints over the past week, and I’ll post some of those in a few days.

I read in a book that you can achieve a dark gray tone by printing a Van Dyke brown image on top of an underexposed cyanotype. You have to do the cyanotype first-if you do the Van Dyke brown as the first layer, the cyanotype sensitizer will bleach away the Van Dyke brown image.
I decided to try it. The first thing I did was presoak the paper I was going to print on. Papers, even the high quality ones I’ve been using, will shrink a little once they’ve been wet and allowed to dry. The image of course shrinks as well, meaning that when you go to print the second layer, you will not be able to achieve proper registration.

I used the negative I made for the first image in the last post, and did a cyanotype print at a 6 minute exposure, rather than the usual 12 minutes. When the cyanotype dried, I coated Van Dyke brown over it, and did a full exposure. Here’s what I got.


As you can see, I didn’t get the dark gray tones. It’s kind of interesting, but not what I expected.

I tried another one. This time, I used this print, Which I thought had printed a little splotchy. The cyanotype was printed at full exposure, and I hadn’t preshrunk the paper, so I knew the negative registration would be little off. What I didn’t expect was this.


The resulting image has a strong split toned look. Dark areas remain solidly blue, while lighter tones have a gray-brown color. The registration is of course off, giving a slight bas-relief look. There are also what look like brush strokes all over the print, which I’m guessing are from the application of Van Dyke brown sensitizer. I have to admit it’s pretty cool, and I like the look of the piece, even if I’m not going to exhibit it.

Looking back at the first print I made like this, I can now see the same split-toned effect. That image isn’t nearly as crisp or high contrast as the McDonalds panorama, so the colors seem to combine more.
While interesting, I don’t plan on continuing with combining these two processes. The unpredictability is appealing, but I want to focus more on gum bichromate printing, which will take a lot of time and energy to work out.

I’ve also played a bit more with toning cyanotype prints, which I previously wrote about here. I mixed up a new batch of tannic acid, and toned some old test prints. Nothing to great to report. Results were a little better than the last time I tried it, but still not terribly thrilling.
I did get one really good toned print.


The original, untoned cyanotype can be seen here. I soaked the print in sodium carbonate first, but either pulled it out too soon, or the chemistry had gone bad, as I didn’t see too much change. I stuck it in the tannic acid, and not much happened. So, I stuck the print into some highly diluted Dektol developer, then back into the tannic acid. The result is the deep violet with grayish highlights you se here. I love it, it works really well with that image.

Recent Work

Nothing too new or exciting to report. I’ve been really busy in the studio, and have several pieces completed. I don’t necessarily like all of them, but that’s another story. Some of them I do like quite a bit, however.

I’m about to start working with the gum bichromate process. I’ve been procrastinating starting it, one, because there are several other process I’m still exploring, and two, because by all accounts it’s kind of a pain in the butt. I’ve done plenty of reading, and know I can make a good go of it, so the plan is to start making my first calibration prints as soon as this weekend. I’ll write more about how that works once I get started.

I think I may have an answer to the crappy results I was getting with the cyanotype toners I wrote about in the last post. In all three toners, the bleaching part of the process worked fine. It was only when I had to soak the prints in a tannic acid solution that they didn’t turn out right. The obvious answer is that the tannic acid solution was spent, so when I get time I’m going to mx some more up and try again. If anyone reading this has experience toning cyanotypes, let me know if you think I’m on the right track.

The plumbing problems I mentioned previously are also being resolved. I bought two new utility sinks at Home Depot that are larger than the ones currently in the basement, and the plumbers are coming tomorrow to install them. It’s going to be pretty expensive-the former owner of my house (who did home repairs as cheaply and stupidly as possible) had used pvc pipe for all the plumbing around the utility sinks, and it all needs to be ripped out and replaced with copper tubing. The plumber told me it should take several hours to complete. So, lots of labor charges and no printing tomorrow. That’s fine. There’s plenty of work I can do on the computer, and the plumbing really needs to be done.

In other news, the Beverly Arts Center, a local arts center in my neighborhood, has the opening reception for it’s annual juried art competition tomorrow night. I entered a piece which I made last year. It was accepted into the exhibit, but the big news is that I got a call from the arts center yesterday. They wanted to be sure I was attending the opening reception, because I won one of the awards being given. I’ll post more details when I know them.

OK, enough news. Here’s some recent work:


This one was taken in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC back in August. It’s two separate photos collaged together. I like the blurred, moving figures, and the odd space/time shift that occurs by having the same woman appear twice. It’s a little streaky, I’ve been having difficulty getting the Van Dyke brown solution to coat well on Rives BFK paper. I printed this image a second time on Arches cold press, and it’s much clearer, although a little lighter and lower in contrast.




These photos were both shot in the Communist Sculpture ark in Budapest, and were printed in Van Dyke brown on Rives BFK paper. I like the first one quite a bit. The second one, not so much. The paper coated with streaks, and I haven’t reprinted because I decided that the image isn’t that interesting.


I really like this print. It’s a collage made from four closeup photos of a small (approx. 6” tall) acupuncture head model. I shot the photos through a store window in San Francisco’s Chinatown and enlarged them to get this print, which is approx. 13’ X 19”.


You’ve seen this one before, I posted the original cyanotype print about a month ago. This is the same print, toned using the eggplant black toner I wrote about here. Unlike my other attempts at toning cyanotypes, this one came out well, and I like the result.

Black Monday

I had my own little black Monday yesterday. Ok, it wasnt as bad as the stock market plunge of 1987, but it was one of those days where everything I set out to do turned to crap.

I was in the basement trying to get some printing done. The sink in my basement is in horrible shape. Yesterday, the cold water had two settings: trickle and full blast. Because the faucet leaks like mad, having it on full blast meant I was sending sprays of water a couple of feet into the air, soaking everything as I tried to work. Yes, I know I need a plumber. I’m trying to find a larger utility sink first, so that I can have it installed along with the other plumbing work. Unfortunately, I’m having a hard time finding one. In the meantime, I bear with it.

First up was a Van Dyke brown print of this image:


It’s a sort of panorama made from two photos taken with the Nishika four-lens camera. The black and white original looks pretty good, but the first negative I made looked light to me. Sure enough, when I printed it a few days ago, it was way too dark. So, I went back tto the image, lightened it and made other adjusments, and printed a second negative. This one looked much better, so I reprinted using the new negative.

This is what the resulting print looks like:


Still too dark, and the streaks caused from brushing the Van Dyke brown chemistry onto the paper are really annoying. I’ve been doing Van Dyke brown prints on Rives BFK paper, but I’m thinking of trying this image again using the Arches cold press I use for cyanotypes.

Meanwhile, I printed a cyanptype of a collaged panorama image made from photos I took of the first Mc Donalds in Des Plains, IL. It came out beautifully, but as it dried, started getting splotchy looking. It’s especially noticiable in the sky.


While that print was washing, I started tryng some more toning processes on cyanotype prints. I really liked the first one I mentioned in my last entry, so wanted to try some more. Unfortunately, none of these were very sucessful.

Here’s the first one:


This toner works by placing the print in Dektol (Kodak’s basic B&W print developer) until it bleaches, then soaking it in a bath of tannic acid. The book said it would turn the print a smoky black, which is what I was hoping for. What I got was a muddy purple-brown, similar to but not as nice looking as the eggplant-black toner I tried a few days ago.

Here’s the second toner I tried:


This one involved soaking the print in ammonia mixed with water, then in the tannic acid. The book said it would turn brown. As you can see, I got purple. Not bad in itself, but the eggplant-black one is still better.

On to toner #3:


This used the same ammonia and tannic acid baths as the ‘brown’ toner, but also had a third dip into a tray of sodium carbonate to achieve the red tones. The book said this would be red-brown. I got a slightly more red and slightly less muddy version of the black toner mentoned above.

Feeling underwhelmed by these toning processes, I decided to run one more cyanotype of the McDonalds image, to correct for the splotches in the sky. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying atention, and got this:


Yes, I printed it backwards. Would have been a beautiful print if it was done right.

So that’s it. A pretty uninspiring day in the studio. I do have some really nice Van Dyke brown prints I made a few days ago. I’ll post those soon. For now, I’m trying to build up enough ambition to do some more printing.

Van Dyke Brown Prints and Toned Cyanotypes

I’ve spent the past day doing calibration tests on negatives using the Van Dyke brown process. Van Dyke brown is an old photographic process. Like cyanotype, it was first used in the mid 19th century. The process for making a Van Dyke brown print is very similar to the process for making a cyanotype. It’s a little more fussy, however, and unlike cyanotypes, Van Dyke brown prints need to be treated in a fixer bath like regular black and white photographic prints. Van Dyke brown emulsion is much more sensitive to ultraviolet light than cyanotype emulsion is. I’m making Van Dyke brown prints with a four minute exposure, as opposed to twelve minutes for cyanotypes. The resulting prints are a rich brown color, and show a much fuller tonal scale than the naturally high contrast cyanotypes do.

Running exposure calibration tests for Van Dyke brown prints was much easier and faster than it was with cyanotypes (my frustrating struggle with exposure calibration for cyanotype prints is detailed here).

The longer tonal scale present in Van Dyke brown prints meant less adjustment of the transfer curves in Photoshop was needed, and because I had run at least a dozen tests using cyanotype, I had a lot of experience at comparing tones and correctly adjusting the curve. I was able to get really good results in just two steps.


Here’s the first print, made with no adjustments to the transfer curve. It looks pretty good, and I could already see that no major adjustments were needed. The mid to dark tones need a little more separation, that’s about it. I adjusted the transfer curve, printed another negative, and ran another print.


Here’s the result. I think it’s as good as I’ll get. I could be really picky and try to expand the tones in the 90-100% range, but I doubt there would be a noticeable difference in the prints.

While I was working in the basement, I decided to try toning cyanotype prints. There are several different formulas for toning cyanotypes, many of them can be found in The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James. I chose one that tones the prints to what is described in the book as an eggplant black color. It basically involves dipping a finished cyanotype into a solution of sodium carbonate, which bleaches the image. After a rinse, the print is submerged in a tray of tannic acid for several minutes.

I chose one of my old test cyanotype prints to experiment with toning. Here’s the original cyanotype:



and here’s how it looks after being toned.


I like the look of the toned print quite a bit. I’m going to try toning a few more to see how I like them. I’m also going to start printing negatives to use in making Van Dyke brown prints. I’ve got at least four negatives ready to go, so watch this space for more images appearing soon.

Home Again

I returned home from San Francisco on Saturday, and am getting back into my studio routine. I was supposed to have returned on Friday, but heavy rains in San Francisco caused major flight delays, and my flight ended up getting canceled. Luckily, lodging wasn’t an issue, as I was staying with my sister and her family. I easily rebooked a flight for Saturday morning, then spent Friday afternoon shooting the rain-soaked streets of North Beach and Chinatown.


I also went to the top of Coit Tower, which is just a couple of blocks from where my sister lives, and got some good shots there as well.


It was a really fun and productive trip. I shot over 875 photos with my digital camera, 11 rolls of film (132 photos) with the Holga camera, and 7 rolls of film in the Nishika camera. I shot in a lot of interesting locations like the Musee Mecanique and Fairyland (which I mentioned in previous posts), Japantown, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Chinatown, and many other places.


Now comes the hard part-going through all those photos and figuring out which ones to use and what to do with them. I’ve already made a large negative of a photo I took in Chinatown to make a cyanotype print from, and all the film has been taken to a lab for developing. I’ve got chemistry ready to start printing Van Dyke brown prints and gum bichromate prints. High quality artist’s paper, ink for my printer, and more transparency film are on order. Really, if there's a problem now, it's that I have more things to do than I have time to do them in.

Hello from San Francisco

I've been having fun in San Francisco. Been spending time with my niece, having dinner with friends, and enjoying the beautiful city. Been doing a lot of shooting as well, and haven't even gone to any of the places I'm planning on shooting at.

Here's a couple of photos. I haven't been able to do anything with them except resize them, but you can see the sort of things I'm shooting.
The one you see at the top of this post was taken in Chinatown last night.



This one was taken this afternoon in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood.



This is a storefront window in Chinatown, taken on Saturday. Tomorrow I'm planning on shooting at the Musee Mecanique, and around Fisherman's Wharf.

If I get some good shots, I might post them here.

San Francisco

I’m leaving tonight for a week in San Francisco. Unlike my vacation in Europe this past summer, I’m treating this as a work trip. Although I’ll be spending time with family and friends (I’m staying with my sister, her husband and my niece, who live on Telegraph Hill), my main goal for this trip is to do a lot of shooting. I’ve had this trip in mind ever since applying for my sabbatical. Not teaching gives me the opportunity to travel, and breaking up the hours I’ve been spending in my home studio sounds pretty good right about now.

I’m planning on shooting at the Musee Mecanique, which is a great collection of vintage arcade machines. I’m also planning a trip to Fairyland in Oakland, CA, a 1950’s era children’s theme park which was recently restored. I may also be visiting the Oakland Museum of California, a natural history museum that looks like it could have some interesting dioramas.

I’ll also be wandering around a lot, shooting whatever I find. Chinatown is a likely place, my sister lives just a couple of blocks from there, and it’s a photogenic neighborhood. Fisherman’s Wharf is also a possibility. Although it is pretty much just like Navy Pier here in Chicago (an obnoxious, overpriced tourist trap), it’s likely I would get some good photos there.

I’m bringing three cameras-my digital, a Holga, and my 4-lens Nishika camera, to allow me to make a variety of photos.

I’ll probably update the blog a couple of times while I’m in San Francisco. I may even post some photos.

Until then, here's a couple of cyanotype prints I made yesterday. The first one is a photo I took at the Communist Sculpture Park in Budapest. The second one is an old photo I took a couple of years ago, that I thought would make a good cyanotype.

See you in a week!