in the garden

wow.  the sun was so intense this morning that I only lasted about 20 minutes in my garden before I started to feel a little dizzy.  But here are more digital previews of the next set of negs...I'm very excited to see them as palladium prints.

i pulled up the last of our tiny beets

and noticed this cicada skeleton

and picked some pink and red tomatoes

Palladium

Good negative + good coating = beautiful print!

Finally got into the darkroom yesterday afternoon for printing!  If you've never heard of palladium printing, it's an antique photographic process that requires you to mix together chemistry, hand-coat it onto paper, and expose it to UV light.  The resulting print is whatever size your original negative was.  I had some old chemistry lying around, so I crossed my fingers that it would still work.  Here are some of the results:

Now for some trouble shooting...This negative didn't get pushed all the way into the negative holder--oops!

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The second exposure is a lot better-- except the light changed and the shadow is a bit odd.  Oh, and the missing parts reveal that I didn't coat the chemistry evenly...

developing 4x5 negatives

So, i developed the film this morning in a slosher tray-- felt a tiny bit rusty, but the negatives turned out great.  Next step, palladium prints!

Hello

I'm testing out an amazing linhof camera for some contact palladium prints.  I walked onto my deck this morning for the first shots-- these I shot with my digital camera in the process-- for record and as a comparison to the palladiums.   In the future, I'll be posting a variety of photo format and process tests to this blog.