Links

Here's some interesting links:

Noorderlicht is a Dutch arts organization that runs a photography festival, an online gallery, and published books. There's some really interesting work on their website.

Light Research is a website of online photo galleries, reviews of photo books, and lots of interesting articles on a variety of photography-related subjects.

Ubuweb is one of the best websites I've seen. It's a huge repository of avant-garde art objects, sound recordings, and other interesting things.

Where do I start? The Internet Archive's goal is 'universal access to human knowledge'. Here you'll find tens of thousands thousands of music concerts, lectures, texts, etc. for free and legal download. The amount and scope of their materials is staggering.
Don't miss my favorite part, the amazing Prelinger Archives of ephemeral film.

Making Polaroid lifts

Here’s a few photos taken in my cluttered basement workspace while I was doing the final section of the Polaroid lift panorama seen in the last post.


These are the basic tools I’ve used for the lifts. An old slow cooker on the left to hold the hot water and keep it at a constant temperature, darkroom thermometers to check the temperature of the water (I get the best results with water between 140-150 degrees F), and at the lower right, an old baking pan filled with cool water.



After soaking the Polaroid print in hot water until it starts to bubble off of the paper backing, the print is transferred to the tray of cool water and carefully peeled off of the paper. This photo shows me discarding a large gob of gelatin from the print.



The gelatin removed from the Polaroid print.



The thin and delicate photo emulsion is floating in the tray of water. Here, I’ve put the panorama in progress into the tray to capture the last image. If you look carefully, you can see the photo emulsion floating by my fingers.


After capturing the emulsion on to the paper, I use one of the brayers seen in the background to smooth it out and eliminate air bubbles. The emulsion is very soft and malleable at this point, in this photo I’m pushing the bottom edge of the lift up a little to add more texture.



The finished panoramic lift. You can see it more clearly in the previous post. Click on the image to see a larger version.

The last Polaroid lifts...

...For now, anyway. Here’s the last of the panoramic pieces I made. Just finished it yesterday. This one was a real pain in the butt to make. It’s made from five separate Polaroids, but it took eight photos to make it. Three of the photos fell apart when I was doing the lift, so I had to reprint the ruined photo, wait 24 hours for it to dry, then attempt another lift. As a result, this one took over eight days to do.
I think it turned out pretty well, despite the problems.

Here’s a couple of single image lifts I made while doing the panoramas.

The first one is a photo taken at the Exhibit Museum in Ann Arbor. The second one was taken at the Field Museum in Chicago. I really like them both, especially the second one. That one is being used in a promotional brochure about upcoming events in the Fine and Performing Arts Center at Moraine Valley Community College, where I teach. I’ll be doing a post-sabbatical exhibit at the gallery there next spring, March 27-April 17.

I might return to Polaroid lifts, but I want to start working on some other processes first. I’m about to start making large negatives on my printer, to use for alternative process printing. I’m planning on starting with cyanotypes, but want to start working with gum bichromate as well. I’ve got a lot of negatives made with my Holga and Nishika toy cameras (see earlier posts for some examples), and want to use some of those images to make my digital negatives.

In other news, I’m going out of town for a few days. I’m going to Ann Arbor. The huge Ann Arbor Art Fairs are this week. My mother and sister exhibit at this fair, and I go to help them run their booth. It’s always a fun time, I get to see old friends from when I lived in Ann Arbor. This time, I’m planning on going back to the Exhibit Museum to do some more shooting as well.

Polaroid Lift Panoramas

I’m close to being finished with Polaroid lifts, at least for a while. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been making multi-panel panoramic images with them. I’ve got six of them completed, and one more which will be finished in a few days. I want to start moving into non-silver printing processes, so I will be getting into some research on making digital negatives soon, and putting work with Polaroid porcesses aside.

These panoramas were interesting, but they didn’t turn out quite like I expected. I’m going to post all of the panoramic lifts I’ve made, both the ones that work and the ones that don’t.

First, one that I like.


This is probably my favorite of the panoramic lift images. Everything works well with this one. The separate photos combine together well. The expected distortions are present, but not so much that they distract, and there is a good rhythm to the piece.

Now one that doesn’t work.


This one is a good illustration of one of the things that haven’t worked as well with these pieces. Basically, the geometry and perspective present in the original photos gets lost in the busyness of the lift images.
Take a look at the original panorama I made from the photos I took with my digital camera at the Field Museum:


The strong 2 point perspective and the advancing center section (the display of the antelope) work really well here. In the Polaroid lift piece, however, the sense of perspective is minimized, it seems too busy, and it lacks a focal point (you can also see the tonal and exposure limitations inherent in Polaroid film, but that’s another issue).

I found similar issues with some of the other panoramic lifts.
With this one, I think the image is just too busy and detailed to make a good Polaroid lift. That it is made from more than one photo joined together just adds to the busyness.


Again, here’s the test image I made with the original photos.


I really like the presence of the display cabinetry in the original, but that is mostly lost in the lift image. The color is horrendous (Polaroid’s fault), the overlap in the center is distracting, but mostly, it’s just too busy. This is my least favorite of all of the panoramic lift images. I probably should pretend it doesn’t exist, instead of posting it for everyone to see. Then again, I want to share both the hits and misses as I work through these processes.

Now another good one.


This is my second favorite one. The geometry of the display cases is retained, and while busy, there seem to be a couple of different focal points to draw your eye in.

Two more to go.


This one’s not horrible, but it’s not great either. It has the same faults I discussed above, but to a somewhat lesser extent.


This one’s not bad. It lacks a strong focal point, but does have a strong panoramic feel to it that I like. It wouldn’t be a first pick to put in an exhibition, but If I needed to show it I wouldn’t be embarrassed by it either.

The final piece I’ll post in a few days, it’s still being made.

So, I made seven panoramic Polaroid lift pieces. Assuming that the one still in progress is a good one (I think it will be), that makes three or maybe four of them I like well enough to consider putting in my show next Spring. That’s roughly half, give or take a bit. Not surprising for anyone who works in the arts. While it sounds bad, a 50% success rate is pretty good for photographic processes. I tell my students to expect to use two or three sheets of photo paper to get a good print. To put this in perspective, consider that I made lifts of seven different panoramic scenes, but the day I shot these at the Field Museum, I shot twenty-six separate panoramas (96 individual photos). Twenty-six edited down to seven, of which three or four ended up working. Of course, I’ll probably revisit these panoramas when doing inkjet transfers. Might end up using a few more.

Still Working...

Another productive week, but still not much to show you. I’m in the middle of making several multi-image panoramic Polaroid lifts. The previous lift has to be completely dry before placing the next photo, which means that I can do one section per day. I finished a couple of them today, several more will be finished in the near future.

Unfortunately, all this will need to be put on hold for a few days, because I’m traveling to Michigan to visit family over the July 4th holiday. I’m leaving tomorrow (July 1) and returning on Friday the 6th. So, expect another week with nothing much to show you. After next week I’ll be able to scan some of the finished pieces to post them here. Of course, I’ll be bringing my toy cameras and plenty of film to Michigan, so I won’t be completely stopping work while I’m away.

The Polaroid lifts I’m working on now are interesting, although I’m not finding them all to be as successful as I would like. I made several panoramic scenes at the Field museum, and the lifts are of these scenes. The simpler ones seem to be the most successful. The busier images don’t work as well as Polaroid lifts. I’ve got 10 panoramic scenes in progress, which will likely be narrowed down to 5-6 that I think are good enough to show.

As for technique, I’ve discovered that the temperature of the water you do the transfer in should be cold. I’d been using warm water, based on instructions I’d read. Cold water makes the image a little more difficult to work with, but the benefit is that the gelatin which holds the image to the photo paper quickly returns to a semisolid state, making it much easier to remove and dispose of.

I’ve hit a bit of a snag with the Polaroid 669 film. I started work on a multi-image piece that relies a lot on color to be successful. Unfortunately, Polaroid 669 film is notorious for having a distinct cyan color shift. I have a slide that is bright green, but when I make a Polaroid of it, it turns out bright blue. I put a bright green gelatin filter in along with the slide, but his exposure came out a slightly greenish bright blue, not much different from the first one. So, this project is on hold temporarily, until I figure out what to to. I have an idea, but I’ll need to wait until I shoot a roll of slides to work with.

I also experimented a bit with some Polaroids I wasn’t using for anything else. I found that you can do a lift onto an old photograph. I also discovered that you probably wouldn’t want to. The photo and the lift compete for attention, as you can see here.

Work in Progress

I've had a pretty productive week, although I don't have anything to show you right now.
I spent a few hours in the Field Museum here in Chicago shooting museum displays. The Field Museum is a natural history museum full of taxidermied animals and dinosaur bones, etc. This is the second time I've shot there. I went in March, and mainly concentrated on closeup shots of dioramas and objects on display. This time, I shot entire displays, and did pieced together panoramic views. Some of these will likely show up as Polaroid lifts.
In addition, earlier this week I made some images in Photoshop and shot slides of them to use when making Polaroids for use in transfer processes. Rather than describe what I'm doing, I'll just wait until they're done and post some scans.
I also tried some inkjet transfers (they were a dismal failure). These have been more difficult than I anticipated, but I should be getting some help soon. Someone I met online (Yahoo has a mail group for people working with inkjet transfers) contacted me, and we're going to teach each other. I need assistance with transfer processes, she wants to work with cyanotypes, VanDyke Brown prints, etc. She teaches workshops on transfer processses, so she'll be a good source of info. I'll post scans of inkjet transfers once I get some good ones.
Meanwhile, I've got lots of slides to shoot if I'm going to make Polaroid lifts of the photos I took in the Field Museum.

More Polaroid Lifts

Here's a few more Polaroid lifts I've done over the past week.









This last one is overlapping lifts which create a panorama. Polaroid emulsions are transparent, which makes it easy to overlap images. The first layer has to be completely dry before adding the second, etc. so this one was done over a period of three days. Not bad for a first attempt, and as panoramic images are an interest of mine, I'll be trying more of these in the future.

I'm trying to figure out what else to do with this process. I like it, but it's almost too easy, and seems to want to be pushed a little. The panoramic image is a good start, and I've got a few other ideas to explore as well.