nonamehorss

[nonamehorss]

Caffenol portraits

HP5 400 speed 4x5 film *Developed 12-14 minutes Using Caffenol CM method, plus additional 2560 mcg of iodine (potassium iodide) as a restrainer to help with fogging

*Developed these negatives in 3 groups, all using the same batch of caffenol developer. The first group I developed at 12 minutes, and for each following group I added one minute of developing time to compensate for less potent developer (in theory).

Problems:

- There was some sort of light leak happening. The right sides of the negatives (especially noticeable in the upper right) were a lot thicker. Had to do some backbreaking photoshop work to make these images look okay. (Some of them are still not okay.)

- I under exposed the images a bit. There's a lot of missing detail in his shadowed face under the hat.

- I tried using the same batch of caffenol developer for all three rounds of developing. It's easy to see the progressively thinner negatives as I go. I read somewhere that you can try adding another scoop of coffee (and maybe more vitamin C?) for each re-use of the developer. But that seems very unscientific. I think I'd rather just mix a new batch to attempt at consistency.

Analysis:

- The first batch looks very similar to the negatives from my last post. The difference in developing was an extra drop of iodine and one less minute of developing time.

- The second batch is maybe slightly thin, but might have been okay if the shadows weren't underexposed.

- The third batch is way too thin.

For next time, I'm thinking I'll keep the 4 drops of iodine, go down to 11 minutes developing time, and only use each batch of developer once.

[nonamehorss]

Caffenol experiments with iodine

HP5 400 speed 4x5 film Developed 13 minutes Using Caffenol CM method, plus additional 1920 mcg of iodine (potassium iodide) as a restrainer to help with fogging

(Location: Bow Valley Provincial Park, Alberta)

These images were exposed the same day as my previous post (same lighting and meter readings, more or less), but they were developed separately. (Previous round of images were developed for 14 minutes, with added salt, and without any iodine.)

The film "fogging" was much less this time. I'm not sure if I can definitely attribute that to the iodine, though, since I also shortened the developing time by one minute and did not use any salt this time. It may just be that I was overdeveloping the film previously, or that the salt was doing something weird.

Next round of images to develop, I'm going to take it a bit further - Remove one more minute from the developing time, and add an additional drop of iodine (for a total 2560 mcg of iodine).

I am really curious to know if the iodine is doing anything, so I may do one developing round with iodine and one without, all at the same development time.

[nonamehorss]

Caffenol experiments

HP5 400 speed 4x5 film Developed 14 minutes, using Caffenol CM method, with additional 10g/L non-iodized salt (to help clear the fogging).

f(Location: Bow Valley Provincial Park, Alberta)

The negatives still have a small base level of fogging happening, and look a bit grungy overall. (It took me quite a while in Photoshop to get the images looking this good.)

The usual recommendation for fog with Caffenol developing is to add potassium bromide as a restrainer, but I'm not convinced of it's environmental safety. (I'm using a septic system that leaches into a National Park area.) Some people have reported that adding iodized salt can also act as a restrainer, but that it may not have enough iodine content. I'm going to try using straight iodine and see what happens. (See what happened.)

[nonamehorss]

Guillaume Amat

https://www.guillaumeamat.com/personal-projects/la-profondeur-des-roches

https://www.guillaumeamat.com/personal-projects/open-fields

[nonamehorss]

Old art scraps that seem more poignant now

Mid-2000s, by Jessica Hosman

[nonamehorss]

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

M. Scott Peck

[nonamehorss]

Connie Samaras

“[This work] “The Past is Another Planet,” is based on the research I’ve been doing on Octavia E. Butler’s papers housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino.”

“At first I had no idea what I was going to do. The archive is voluminous and Butler’s brilliance is intimidating. But then I settled into the unknown terrain that comes at the beginning of the creative process. And as I did it came to me that there I was sequestered in the Huntington Library reading Butler’s notes on world building for her novels while outside surrounding me was railroad heir Henry Huntington’s built environment of a garden replicating different botanical regions from all over the world. It was then I decided to take Butler’s archive out of the library and overlay it on to the Huntington Gardens. So I enlarged and transferred onto mylar some of the journal pictures I’d taken. Then with the help of my friend photographer Julie Shafer, we took a 4x5 camera and double exposed the various journal entries and images over corresponding areas of the gardens.“

“For example in the cacti image, I’d taken a journal fragment Butler had written on climate change from a commonplace book she kept while writing Parable of the Sower. At the top of the image I very much wanted the following sentence to read clearly: “Los Angeles was dying. Much of the world was changing – changing rapidly, involuntarily blundering through vast climate change.” She’d written this in red ink but then had scribbled over it. But when I got the film back, I saw that the sentence had broken up into small red fragments that ended up looking like flowers drifting through the treetops.“

https://flaunt.com/content/connie-samaras-photo-la

[nonamehorss]

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had masks. Bourgeois society had mirrors. We have images. We think that we control the world with technology. But with technology, the world controls us. It is a very surprising reversal.

Jean Baudrillard

[nonamehorss]

Globalization

Is this the beginning or end of us? Are we becoming the earth, or is the earth reclaiming us like a lost and disobedient child?

Photos by Ana Mendieta

[nonamehorss]

...and we find that, for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Henri Bergson