Handcrafted Silver Gelatin

[dwross]

Hi All:

Some of you may be aware of the Silver Gelatin forum on APUG. Making developing-out silver gelatin paper (i.e. b&w paper ) is not widely practiced yet. I have high, high hopes that will change soon. I'm lonely!

Unfortunately, APUG is doing its APUG thing to the dialogue. If you recognize what I mean by that, I need say no more. If you don't, I don't know how to say more.

Long story short (hard for me!:o ) I'm moving any contributions I have to make to the emulsion-making dialogue to hybrid. We're still a little thin on the non-digital facets of our crafts, but I think that is changing. In the interest of fleshing out tech info, I have recently posted an update to my AgGel research.

http://dwrphotos.com/blog/Section7/Toning.htm#Current

Hopefully it will start a conversation here -a very small and very slow conversation, to be sure, but yuh gotta start somewhere.

Cheers,
d

[Don Bryant]

Denise,

Though I have nothing to contribute, I think what you are doing is extremely interesting and look forward to your postings on this topic here!

Don

[Katharine Thayer]

Denise,

Though I have nothing to contribute, I think what you are doing is extremely interesting and look forward to your postings on this topic here!

Don

Ditto what Don said.
kt

[dwross]

Thanks Don and kt. I love this place and its folks. You're all invited to my place for hot chocolate (and vodka)

d

[Joe Lipka]

Denise - I would like to think of you as being on the leading edge of the next alternative process. Others don't recognize that yet.

[dwross]

Joe:

I've got my fingers crossed for the best of both worlds: Anyone can go into their darkroom and whip up a batch of custom paper and/or open a box of quality commercial paper. I know I'd hate to see my Ilford Multigrade FB go away. I also know that it wouldn't be the end of the world. Nice thing to know.

I hope everyone is looking forward to a great photo'ing weekend.
d

[mkochsch]

I heart2.bmp your website.

[Katharine Thayer]

I heart2.bmp your website.

Funny; I was just in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea, thinking about how much I like Denise's instructional pages. The illustrations tell the whole story with a minimum of text, making the information immediately accessible and understandable. It's a model to aspire to. But while I'm handing out kudos, Michael's website is also wonderful; a wealth of technical information presented very elegantly, intelligently and succinctly, a joy to peruse and learn from.
Katharine

[dwross]

Michael and Katherine:

Thanks for the nice words. Lovely way to start a Monday morning!

I'm glad Katherine pointed out Michael's website. I've read it so many times I probably have it memorized. I hope everyone appreciates how important the 'open source' concept is. It's the intellectual component to volunteerism and probably just as underestimated, but it is almost certain that private individuals, contributing and sharing, will be the progress engine of the forseeable future.

And, if anyone reading this is not aware of Katherine's website, they should take a look. Talk about a wealth of accessible information. I love color and I've been circling round and round the idea of combining 3-color gum with silver gelatin. Now... that'll be a bit of work and I need a nap just thinking about it and it's all KT's fault! Her gum portrait of apricots has me salivating every time I see it. Beautiful.

[Katharine Thayer]

Denise, I've been meaning to respond to this for some time, but life kept intervening. Thanks for the kind words. A couple of comments:

I really appreciated what you wrote about Michael's (and I'd include by extension others who share the same attitude about information, like Clay, Bjorke, etc) open-source approach to digital negatives and about volunteerism; I think there's something profound and important in what you said. I agree; it's individual people, working together and helping each other and sharing what they know freely and creating community that will preserve what sanity is left in the world and maybe even restore some of what's been lost.

I find your thought about printing 3-color gum over your silver emulsions intriguing. I hope you won't be deterred by the remarks about how complicated gum is. Gum isn't that difficult, at least printing gum isn't that difficult. It's when people start explaining gum and trying to agree on what's going on with gum that it starts getting contentious and complicated.

When I was looking at your page on toning, I enjoyed seeing the different colors you got with the different toners, but being a gum printer, I was thinking that you could get the same effect with a layer of gum over the basic image in silver, the way some of the folks here do gum over platinum, or gum over cyanotype; in each case I could picture the pigment you might use to get the same color. And it seems to me that doing gumovers (I hope this won't offend gumover printers) is less complicated than doing the whole thing out of gum from scratch, because in the case of a gumover, you're just using the gum to add color to an existing image, not creating an image from gum. I don't know if you ever have prints that don't turn out perfectly that you could use to experiment on, but if so, I'd say start with one of those first and just try it. You've already got the spirit of adventure and the perseverance that makes a good gum printer. I'd be happy to provide any assistance I can along the way.
Katharine

Michael and Katherine:

Thanks for the nice words. Lovely way to start a Monday morning!

I'm glad Katherine pointed out Michael's website. I've read it so many times I probably have it memorized. I hope everyone appreciates how important the 'open source' concept is. It's the intellectual component to volunteerism and probably just as underestimated, but it is almost certain that private individuals, contributing and sharing, will be the progress engine of the forseeable future.

And, if anyone reading this is not aware of Katherine's website, they should take a look. Talk about a wealth of accessible information. I love color and I've been circling round and round the idea of combining 3-color gum with silver gelatin. Now... that'll be a bit of work and I need a nap just thinking about it and it's all KT's fault! Her gum portrait of apricots has me salivating every time I see it. Beautiful.