Journal Entries

Ether is definitely in the air these days (along with a hell of a lot of pollen, apparently). Two tintype posts in one day…not that any season isn’t a fine time to make tintypes, but ...

A photographer came to the Alt Pro class yesterday so we wanted to give him something visible to photograph – like a nice big 8×10 camera in action. (Basically I use any excuse to make ...

I had thought I was perfectly happy with my 4×5 – seemed like the negatives were plenty large – and once I got into historical process printing I could make my (digital) negatives any size ...

After watching several workshops make calotypes – one of the earliest forms of photography – I finally got a chance to make that step back in time myself. The process is a little slower and ...

Back when I started to get excited about tri-color gum printing I thought I’d begin with some bolder colors – seemed obvious and somehow easier. Don’t know if it is either of those, but it ...

It’s that time of year again when Brenton Hamilton’s Advanced Alternative Processes class piles in a van and heads up to Trenton, Maine, to spend a day working in Alan Vlach’s photogravure studio. Since there ...

Way back over Christmas break I got motivated to design some rubber stamps to use for marketing materials. Kari’s mom, coincidentally, has a ton of stamps and stamp pads of various colors, so for a ...

Last December, while on Christmas break in Minnesota, I finally had the chance to try doing wetplate photography in sub-freezing temperatures. While our dark tent and chemicals were in a warm dry house, the cameras, ...

This past Christmas Kari gave me an old black box camera – turns out to be an Agfa Ansco 2A Antar, I believe, which seems to be a circa 1930s camera. I guess they liked ...

This post really should be more interesting than the title sounds. It’s not a chemistry lesson, I promise! A little over a year ago I started learning about historical photographic printing processes, or “Alternative processes”, ...

No, this isn’t a story about a new flavor of chewing gum. The “gum” in the title refers to a photographic printing process called “gum bichromate”, which uses watercolor pigment, potassium dichromate, and the eponymous ...

I’ve recently become interested in two somewhat-related things: first, producing hand-made prints from my images, and secondly, creating distinct and coherent bodies of work. The first of these, then, are a series of prints from ...