Saturday Night Comfort

Many thanks to Dave and Sue for excellent hospitality - certainly a beautiful bedroom with splendid four-poster bed and view from the window.

Against the Light

The sun eventually came out yesterday morning and produced some great backlighting. Original file and monochrome and colour versions of the punting - not sure which I prefer. The shadows looked like a row of masked figures with large noses. The bright light and low angle made interesting shadow patterns at Madingly American Cemetery.

Water Drops

The life of a drop hitting the surface of water (well actually five different drops!). Taken at 0.4 sec f20 with flash. Processing of RAW included adding blue gradient from bottom right and vignette.

Printing Notes

A further couple of weeks have passed since I last described the stages in producing a screen print from my Winslow Edge image. I am posting a few notes to help me remember so I can repeat the stages later.

Place the film with emulsion side against the backing sheet of the film in a vacuum frame. The positive is between light source and film so exposure is through backing sheet of film.
The mid tone and black were exposed for 1.75 min and the backgroung 3.5 mins 1000 watt UV lamp.

The Film was developed in tray of 1.5% hydrogen peroxide (1 to 11 of St B stock) for 1 min (or 90 secs) shiny side down.
Wash out unwanted emulsion with hand hot water (?41-43C) (shiny side down)
Placed washed film down with matt side onto the screen. Dry and press flat with newsprint and roller.

Dry and use blue masking fluid to cover area around the emulsion. When dry remove backing from film. Attach the screen to the press, put on registration markers for the paper and cover all rest of vacuum bed with newsprint. Ready to spread the ink and start printing.

Owls in Monochrome

I have added a Gallery of Nature Monochrome images to my website today. The medium certainly suits these nocturnal raptors.

Monochrome nature

As part of a talk I am giving on Sunday, I have been working on some images that I have always thought would be best in monochrome. I have not been disappointed as these four images have very much more impact in monochrome than their colour counterparts. My next task is to prepare a webpage with the addition of few more of these conversions

For Wendy

Five images taken in Clare College this morning with the infrared camera. All taken with f1.8 and showing very limited depth of field.
The final image is from Queens' College.

Bright sunlight in Cambridge

A couple of images from Cambridge on a bright morning after a lot of rain has cleared the air.

Anglesey Abbey

Beautiful spring-like day today at Anglesey Abbey - couldn't resist mirror imaging the birch trees.
The witch hazel and dogwoods in the Winter Garden were particularly colourful and there were even a few snowdrops in full bloom.

Cambridge Infrared

I took a short trip into Cambridge this morning with my infrared camera. The first two are monochrome conversions showing wrought iron gates and how using the infrared camera lightens the backgrounds. With the image of the two couples, I have swapped the blue and red channels while the aconite has colour added to the image. It is great to see the first spring flowers already in full bloom.

Colour idea for print

I do not know if a grey ink can be used in silk screen printing but I like this mockup. I have not been able to find two colours that I like together so it may have to be light blue for background with darker blue for midtones.

More on the printing

These notes are to remind me next time what I did to make the silk screens for printing from a photograph. Instead of using the posterisations as tone separations, which was my original thought, I made three separate separations for the background, midtones and black areas using colour range. They were adjusted to the required size (A3) at 600 dpi, gray scale and bitmap and printed out onto digital transfer film on an Epson 7600 printer.

I then added some texture in the white area of the midtone positive by applying waste black toner suspended in water. As it dried, I moved the film around to create interesting patterns.

The next stage will be to make photographic negatives from these positives which will be applied to the silk screens.

Printing Presses

Three images of the beautiful presses at St Barnabas Press.The gold decorated one is dated 1854, many are much older.

Printing Course

I am doing a course on silk screen and other types of printing this year and am using my old favourite Winslow edge as the starting point for silk screen printing. I made three tonal separations with different posterisation levels. As an experiment to see what colours might work, I have used each of these as mask for fill layers. I included two extra layers - one as a dissolve blend to give some texture to the background.