MorseBlog

 I recently was laid up for a week with what I would guess is Covid. Almost three years dodging it and it seemed to finally catch up with me.  It was with great relief to get out and about the past couple of days for my morning walks through Sandpoint. I always bring my camera just in case and sometimes I get some nice images though that is never my intent. One must be cognizant that even the most familiar or mundane surroundings can lead to some excellent images.  This morning it was very cold (-13C) so a brisk walk well bundled-up was called for. My walk usually takes in the City Beach area and a view of the lake. Yesterday a good breeze was blowing up off the water for some extra chill. This morning however the air was still with mist rising off the water and small flakes of snow precipitating from the moisture in the air as there were no heavy clouds overhead. This light snow seemed to increase as I got close to the lake so I surmised the moisture from the lake was th...

A couple of weeks ago I began to re-explore getting film negatives from a digital file . The motivation was to take some of my newer digital images and print them in black and white in the darkroom. I explored two different vendors Bayeux in London UK and Gammatech in Albuquerque, NM. I outlined the difference in offerings according to the information on their websites and some correspondence via email.  By the time I wrote the post I had given up on Bayeux as the gentleman there never responded to the file I sent. I thought perhaps I had offended him with some of my comments or questions. However he got back to me a couple of days ago to say that the film was done and he wanted to know where to ship it to. They had had some problems with the Kodak LVT machine and had to call in a technician to repair it.  Meanwhile, Gammatech was immediately responsive and printed and developed the film in a couple of days.  Today I received a parcel from Gammatech and inside were three...

Having arrived back in Sandpoint a little over a week ago, I find the weather much changed from when I left just before Christmas. At that time I drove down to Spokane in sub-freezing conditions but have returned in much warmer weather, often 10 degrees or more above freezing. This has been accompanied by light to moderate rain at times. The mounds of snow are shrinking slowly and the roads are almost entirely free of snow and ice.  Meteorologically, the conditions create a lot of gray skies and swirling masses of fog at all different altitudes. The warm most air (humidity near 100% most days) touches the deep snow fields and there is a ground fog that develops. Higher up great banks of fog eclipse the mountains and then dissipate into thin wisps and skeins of fog.  Overall the palette of colors remains restricted to grays and blues where sometimes a little sun makes its way through the clouds to add a small touch of warmth. It feels generally like black and white weather. I f...

The next phase of any lith printing I do tends to be toning. I never feel in control of my toning, but I manage to stumble into some interesting images as a result. Today I played with some sepia and gold toning but didn't really get anything I liked. I moved onto selenium toning as there can be some rather intense results.  Blog Post Thumbnail Image I use a 1+3 dilution of selenium which always results in strong color changes. For most of my lith the end point (to completion) of selenium toning is a rusty red almost strong sepia tone as seen below.  Wistow ORWO f11 23 sec burn sky 45 sec toned On the way to this color, it passes through a cooler almost purple tone. This led me to think about getting a combination of tones though selective toning. I have done this before, and it works well for images with a strong line like a horizon. I dip the wet print only up to the point I want toned. I try and be careful about where the toner goes. The toner effect can lag quite a bit in ...

After much upheaval in my personal life living a semi-nomadic existence in the USA and UK I have not been in the darkroom for some time. My last effort was at the very end of May just before my move to the USA. I am back in the UK for Christmas and New Years and found some time to do some lith printing. I had to look through the back catalog to find some subjects to print.  Lith Printing Recap In many ways lith printing is easier than conventional printing. The exposure is not critical, and I learned some important techniques back in 2021 that made lith finally click for me. For instance, I meter the exposure on the easel at Ev 4 (ISO 100) in the highlight areas of the image using an incident light meter. This corresponds to about 45 seconds of exposure. I usually bracket this +/-1 stop to start with. Burning helps a lot to balance the exposure on the print. Any sky wants a stop or 2 of burn to bring the tones in line with the foreground.  I also crop out areas that are too ...

I am revisiting this subject of how to put a digital image onto a piece of film. The motivation for this is to be able to make silver gelatin prints in the darkroom from digital images. Since I bought my Fuji GFX 50s ii digital camera, I have been blogging about it recently and would like to use some of these images in the darkroom. I can print these as c-prints and inkjet however getting a print dialed in with cycle times between versions is problematic. I admit I have difficulty being satisfied with the commercial printers I have used. Somewhere between the consistency of the process and my inability to visualize the print from the screen has frustrated me. In the darkroom one goes through a series of trials until one has a print one is satisfied with. This can take between 2 and 20 prints depending on the objective and the quality of the negative.  I was recently watching a YouTube video of a master printer in Britain, and he mentioned to the ham-handed interviewer that he used...