MorseBlog

As part of my project to make a story book , I have a vague idea of including at least one print from the black and white photos my brother took. He used a Hasselblad with two film backs so he captured black and white as well as color images.  Conceptually I thought perhaps a hand colored print would be way of doing this. My grandmother often hand tinted photos my grandfather took and I have experimented at different times both oil tints and colored pencils . Pencils offer more control and are less messy. After my first attempt with a simple cheap pencil set I bought a larger set. Some research showed these were good so I bought the set. I have starting printing on Ilford MG ART 300 paper which is 100 percent cotton rag paper like water color paper. It is expensive but I usually like the results. For hand coloring with pencils it has a great advantage of having some real 'tooth' where even FB matte paper has some difficulty getting the pencils to transfer color. I chos...

I have done a small amount of different kinds of books. Some of the ones I did with Blurb can be found on the right hand column of the blog. I have also bound and cased in my own photo book from scratch. This entailed hand sewing the pages together, gluing in C-prints of my photos, casing in the book and wrapping it in book binder's leather. I was please for my first attempt though I picked the project up and dropped it over the years so it probably took 4 years to finish! So daunted I felt at various phases. Never-the-less a valuable experience. I also made a book from a text block I bought and then cased it in myself. I describe the process here . Another satisfying project that ended up as a gift. More recently I self-published a long story about a river trip with my brother. I had a good response to this and I have been in the process of editing it to make it a better story with the help of my cousin who used to be a book editor. This last project led me to revise what st...

One of the things that attracted me to film photography was as a means of connecting to my brother who worked long in photography and for whom it was a great enthusiasm. He spent some time as a commercial photographer. After his passing some 20 years ago my father and I came into possession of most of his photographs and negatives. Some of these I assembled into a Blurb book. Many others I continue to use as subjects in my dark room for printing. A number of my favorites were ones taken during a backpacking trip to the Maze District in Canyonlands Utah we took together. This trip is outlined in a prior posting on this blog. Among some I printed as 12x16 for a project are the following. Maze Cottonwood 12x16 Maze Juniper 12x16 Maze Waterfall portrait Maze Waterfall landscape My brother took a combination of black and white and color slides on his Hasselblad. The one below I thought would make a good addition to the set. however this one is a color slide. In genera...

Its been some time since I have done some FB prints in 12x16" size. I like bigger print sizes but with FB there is always the drying and flattening problem. I wrote an article about a solution for 8x10" prints which I use regularly and like the results. I scaled this up not too long ago for 12x16" and my initial trial resulted in some damage to the paper in the corner. This mimicked a comment made by a reader when he had tried to scale up a similar solution. Though the damage and distortion was limited it did discourage me. I let the problem roll around in my head until I decided to do more prints. I had an unopened box of Ilford MGIV FB Classic and I wanted to try it. I decided I could reduce the paper tension by clamping the edges with less force. This worked flawlessly. Flat prints with no damage. I will give a complete report in a later post. For this I chose some photos my brother took while we were on a backpacking trip in the Maze district in Canyonlands in Ut...