So I placed these in the compost bin a while ago, and the promptly forgot about them. In some spots the image is mostly latent. Nearly completely gone, the staining came out with very interesting patterns on the print. I am happy with these as well just thought it came out well.
Just a couple more using vary lengths of time in the water. Varying how they are positioned as well.
So as I said before I was going to coat new papers and coat them lighter. I am much happier with these results. I finally got back to paper white. Strangely enough these are actually taking a longer to expose to get into a good contrast. Overall I am much happier with these out comes. I took the time to make duplicates and make darker printsin order to try and coffee tone again.
I decided to use the prints I was unhappy with to attempt toning some of my prints with coffee. The process involves a bleaching step. After researching the recommended agent was a 1% solution of sodium carbonate. Well after being unable to locate sodium carbonate easily, I dug deeper and found you could use a solution of sodium bicarbonate so went that way.
The next step is a bath of well coffee. Using instant coffee as recommended (is thought of using the leftovers of my morning french press but I was actually out of coffee. I decided to go with what many people recommended instant coffee. the toning process seems to take a while, ~ 1 hour minimum in the toner bath according to my research.
So end results are as posted here. The image I am most happy with completely fell apart and is shredded. However one of these is somewhat successful, i was not happy with these images in the first place. I am moving forward and made duplicates of the last set of cyanotypes I made and plan on working on the those, as I write this there are some toning.
So I spent some time soaking some other prints in the ocean water. I love the way this is altering the prints. As time moves forward I am soaking them individually rather than multiples at a time as well as floating them on top of the water.
Either way I feel that the spirit and theme of the work is working well together. I really am altering the representation of the thing that they are of.
So this is my first work with self coated paper. I am happy with the results it took some work you can tell by the number of prints on the same image i had to go through and work on the negatives a little.
My plan is to make more this weekend. I am looking around 2 minute exposures in the southern California sun. The prints seem to be quite dark though and also rather dense I feel like i may have over coated the paper. Well next paper I coat will be thinner.
So along the same lines of The Composted Prints , I am interested in altering the prints after they are printed. This was a set I did during one of my frequant trips to Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, Ca. I place I draw a lot of centering and calm from. I decided months ago to allow the peace in my mind, the meditation and connection to take photos.
I took a lot of photos this trip never changing focus or any camera setting during the adventure. The question was what to do with these photos after ward. I started with
Tides , After a while a was unhappy with these images and reedited the photos and produced a different look. While I enjoy this image I wanted something more, I felt that the images were not the thing that I have found so consoling, but simply a representation of such. So I began looking to it in a different way.
I made prints of the Individual images in the larger piece. At 5×5 they are not large but big enough to take notice. This last weekend I spent some meditative time at the location and collected some of the tide waters as i was there. After coming home in the evening with a jar full of ocean water, I shoved 4 of the prints into the salted water. Forty Eight hours passed with no changes to the images, and i was beginning to thing that this would be an exercise in idea rather than physical alteration.
I awoke this morning to sudden and noticeable change, there was cyan flecks floating in the ocean water and the prints had been forever changes to the one of a kind images.
So when I was working on the cycles project I made some C-Type prints of all photos I took of the jars. Cycles had always been a project I wanted to go on for a while and it led me to create a small home compost jar for my kitchen waste. Inspired by Matthew Brandt I decided to add the prints to the pile.
I added the photos to the compost on March 1st and pulled them out of the compost on the 5th and was pleasantly surprised by the changes in only a few days. Large swathes of red are now apparent on the print, oranges and yellows are streaked amongst the previously high key greens and browns. The white has been stained in a great umber color.
Overall I am very happy with these results and will do it with the remainder of the prints. I am very curious to see what may happen as the the compost continues to break down will different chemical compounds reveal themselves and effect the print. Also the compost is extremely moist right now and I am waiting to see what will happen as it dries out.
Robert Adams has continued to inspire my work in the photographic arts. Though I may take some of his ideas and some of the ose of others and begin to combine them. I started a project that was heavily influenced by his seascape work last fall, I plan to continue this work but it has gone through a few changes and reedits of the photos.
The following was inspired From Adams’ sea scape work. I posted the before but i have never posted the new edit’s of the images. My first time editing the images i tried very hard to follow with his asthetics of the more blown out image, mostly high key but with occasional areas of dark black.
After hanging these on the wall at the begining of the semester, and stareing at them for weeks on end, I was no longer ok with the original edit, and though I have not done all of the images yet I am happy with my new image.
The new image I decided to go darker, more contrast and to provide some texture into the image through Nik color effects. Some how to me this felt more tactile, and really portrayed why I love the ocean as much as I do.
Next step on this project is to make some physical prints, and destroy them.
The 10 week mark…Still stagnant, not a whole lot of change in either jar at this point, and if anything the plants are looking slightly weaker again. I made the decision to leave them in the growing jar for another week for two reasons. I am hoping that next week they will appear stronger again and in order to get a good layout on the grid part of the project. I did not like the grid that came out this week.
Again these jars appear to be reflective of life for me. Existing in some sort of strange holding pattern with minor movements forward, but no complete collapse at the same time. No leaps and bounds of change. Maybe the transplant see big change is what they need to move forward. Or maybe it will be the death of them.
Jerry Slough Photography 