Wedding Portraits on Glass

Wedding Portrait Session with Sorcha and Gabi:

Wet plate outdoors.

Finally, after a long, long break I took a few plates outside!

It feels great and I hope to do it often this year. 

These images were taken close to my house, so I didn't use a portable darkroom (just 'regular' one), but still, climbing down and up a steep hill and jumping through the river with heavy tripod and 4x5 camera, was quite an adventure (and a good exercise too). Here are the results and technical info:

''Shape'', 

4x5 ambrotype, Poe Boy Collodion, Toyo View, Schneider Apo Symmar 150mm @ f8:

''Glencree River'', 

4x5 ambrotype, Poe Boy Collodion, Toyo View, Schneider Apo Symmar 150mm @ f8:

and backstage image of the location:

RHA exhibition and Lith printing.

RHA Gallery

Last Wednesday I had a pleasure to take part in a photographic tour, lead by Amelia Stein, organised every year, during the Annual Exhibition in RHA gallery. (27 May - 09 August)

It's a good occasion to meet fellow photographers and discuss work, sizes, presentation/framing issues and as always having a chat about digital versus analogue.

I have a pleasure to present this little lith print there, this year:

                           

Waiting for Z.

This is a part of a series of pictorial landscapes of Wicklow Mountains. I've started it in 2012, and came back to printing it in April this year. My motivation for undertaking this project again was an upcoming exhibition in Galerie Lisette (where I decided to show it) and the fact that the above image was chosen for the RHA Exhibition.

Untitled

The whole series can be viewed  on my web site - here. It is on ongoing project so there should be more prints soon.

These lith prints were created with use of mostly colour holga negatives (and some B&W). I've used Rollei Vintage developer and Fomatone Classic Matt paper.

The exhibition in the Galerie Lisette, Enniskerry, was held in May, but most of these prints stayed in the Gallery and they are there, available for view and purchase.

Lith printing is one of the alternative photographic techniques, invented in 1970s. In this process a negative is heavily overexposed onto regular or ‘lith’ dedicated paper and developed in highly diluted lith developer. Prints are not developed to completion but snatched and stopped at the right time, which is crucial for the look of the image.  The results may vary from very detailed to very grainy, painterly and colourful (from pink to orange to brown).

Each print is very unique and it is very difficult to achieve repeatable results due to quick exhaustion of the developer. The technique was made popular mainly by works of music photographer Anton Corbijn.

Back to lith printing

These are the results of a few recent lith printing sessions with use of medium format negatives, created with Holga camera.

It's really amazing how this process is transforming images, revealing something completely new from the photograph with each print.

I've used both colour and B&W negatives. Generally colour negatives can give good results with lith, but not all are suitable and orange mask creates difficulties and increases exposure time. It’s especially challenging with moody, misty, low contrast holga images I’ve used. 

These are the test prints of a possible bigger series of a pictorial landscapes I'd like to create. 

All images printed with Rollei Vintage Lith Developer on Fomatone MG classic paper.(first, third and fifth printed with colour neg.)