MorseBlog

This print I call 4+1 I made last year in Holme Fen. It has stuck with me as a nice image and I have included it in my Three Wood Lands photobook . The first time I printed it I took a test print and hand colored it . It looked alright but I cropped out the flaws in photoshop so it needed to be done again at some point.  4+1 Blog Post Cover Image (Cold Tone) I had read somewhere that for hand coloring prints it is preferable to use a warm tone image. I set about combining the need to make a better hand colored version with an experiment with sepia toning and hand coloring. I made 4 different prints. Normally I make these prints for hand coloring a half or full stop lighter so the color has a chance to shine.  For all the images I used Ilford MG Art 300 paper as it has a cotton rag base and the texture is much like watercolor paper. This paper is my favorite for hand coloring with pencils as the rough texture takes the color easily. I developed them all with Moersch Eco 4812 which has a

This is the second in the series exploring the images from a study I did on some trees in the Cambridgeshire countryside. This post contains a lot of detail notes of the process a more readable summary of the  project is here . Blog Post Cover Image This time I am looking to lith developer to see if I can improve contrast. I have a love/hate relationship with lith as I have found it very difficult to get consistent results. This is often what makes it attractive to others however. I also don't like the long development times and in the past resorted to  heating the developer .  Never-the-less I embarked on this branch of the journey of these prints with such low contrast.  I found the results so good at one point that I kept venturing deeper into lith territory. I found the rewards of  persistence and research.  Lith Prints I mixed up a batch of Fotospeed Lith developer 15ml+485ml water for each part A and part B per instructions.  I started out with the Ilford FB Classic paper and

This is the first post on a series of attempts to print some of the images I made in the Mathematical Trees Study blog post . This post contains a lot of detail notes of the process a more readable summary of the project is here . My objective is to explore these images for their potential and also to stretch my darkroom skills. These images in heavy fog are haunting but also a real problem to print. There is such a narrow range of tone there is not really the idea of shadow just different highlights. This tends to mean that want appears an scene evenly lit by the diffuse light is in fact a gradient brightest closest to the sun moving subtly darker away. The negative scan below is not my objective, it just reveals the subtle range of tones. I want to present the fog as white (not gray) and yet have the trees apparent.  Scanned Negative My first attempt was to try and tease out some contrast on Ilford MG Art 300 paper. This paper is based on a cotton rag watercolor paper so has a strong

I set about making a study by re-photographing some trees in the fog. As part of this I decided as I often do to print some of these images. These negatives are a challenge as they lack any significant contrast. This project reinforced my belief that spending time on a challenging problem can lead to unexpected yet satisfying results. One has to be open to following where the process leads, dead-ends and all. The second installment in this series is here.. . Here is a summary of a many days long processes where I will cut to what I think are the best results. I have more detailed discussions of each stage here...(links may not be live immediately) Conventional Print Details Lith Print Details I started making conventional prints. My aim was to stick to a theme of ‘ma’. It is not possible keep the fog white and the trees dark. So I biased towards white fog. I managed a couple of versions in Ilford Art 300 paper and Ilford FB Classic. They are here... Ilford MG Art 300 Ilford MG FB Class