Getting things done. 5am photography and hacking life.

glenn bech November 13, 2020

“A life hack (or life hacking) is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. The term was primarily used by computer experts who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow in ways other than programming.!”

Taken with my Hasselblad 500cm on Kodak Gold. Scanned. Converted to Black and white. Printed as digital negative

It’s actually not very difficult to get up at 5 am. The difficult part of the habit to make hitting the sheets at 10 pm. Luckily the process is self-enforcing. After a couple of days, you are so tired at 10 am that it is autopilot from thereon. What helped me become a morning person is to see this as a trade. I can trade 3 hours of time of mindless social media and Netflix evening time, for 3 hours of productive - actually getting something done time in the morning.

This Wednesday I got this cyanotype done, I also got time to make a pot of my favorite caffeinated brew and put together a video for my youtube channel describing the process. All before 8am and just in time for my real job.

Going nuts with Cyanotypes #1 Chestnuts

glenn bech September 23, 2020

The playfulness, more kitchen sink and less “scientific” approach to printing is probably why I make cyanotypes even as I explore more and more alternative photographic processes. My recent experiments are toning prints in extracts from acorn and horse chestnut.

Most practitioners of this craft are known to submerge their hard work into bleach, watch the print almost fade and then pray to an appropriate deity for the tones to re-appear in a different hue.

I have found that a reverse toning process - soaking in toner first, and then in the bleach works well for chestnut and acorn. See my other post for an example and time-lapse.

For this print I have used chestnut husks only and it gently alters the highlights towards red/pink and changes the blue just slightly away from the well know Prussian and leaves a sligh pink stain on the paper.

Toner

Roughly chop or blend about 30 grams of chestnut husks, watch out for spikes!
Add 300 ml / 1 cup of boiling water
Let steep and cool for 24 hours

Process

This is my “reverse” toner process where I soak first and bleach second

Soak the print in water so that the paper is wet before you start toning
Soak the print in the toner for 60 minutes, you can dilute the toner slightly to get more liquid
Make a bleach solution of sodium carbonate - a bit weaker than you would use to bleach a cyanotype before toning
Let the print soak in the bleach and watch it not fade but change tone directly.
Pull it out and wash it when you are happy with the result

Toning Cyanotypes with nickel (ii) sulphate

glenn bech July 30, 2020

Nickel as a toning option for Cyanotype is not often mentioned. I first noticed it when reading Mike Ware - the “Cyanotype II” inventor’s extensive book on Cyanotypes.

The source for Mike Ware’s book is research done by Holtzman H, and his article “Alkali resistance of the Iron blues” published in Industrial Engineering Chemistry 37, 9 (1945).

As many of you probably have noticed, alkali buffered papers work really bad for cyanotypes - and exposing the print to an alkaline solution like bleach or sodium carbonate is a part of the process for “bleach first” toners. Nickel toning was/is used to enable Prussian blue to be used in alkaline environments. For cyanotype printers - another interesting side effect of Nickel, is the green/turquoise tone it makes on the print

The results are striking, even with weak solutions. After about 15 minutes of toning in a 1% bath a split-tone happens where highlights are drawn against a green/turquoise that works really well with the dark Prussian blue.

Mike Ware suggests Toning with a 10% solution and after one hour of toning the entire image should be shifted towards green - I will absolutely try that in a later experiment.