Old Exposures / New Prints

Hot and humid weather and I don’t get along well. Thus, I often retreat to my basement dim room this time of year to make prints. I spent an evening last week searching my Lightroom catalog for a few images to print as salted-paper prints.

Yesterday, I printed small (4×5 inch negatives) of six of these images, all made in 2014 and 2015. Today, I coated some paper (6×7.5 inch sheets of Hahnemühle Platinum Rag) and made prints.

The first two images were made around the ‘neighborhood’. Pine Haven was a tourist cabin establishment on Route 9 in Antrim. It has never been a working business in the roughly forty five years I have been driving past it. The rate of its decay seems to have picked up in recent years. Jane is our next door neighbor; an image of the opposite side of her barn, printed as a cyanotype, was my Winter Solstice print several years ago.

The middle two images are from a series I made one afternoon wandering about downtown Brattleboro, VT. I have the entire series as color prints (which are rare for me except for my wildlife work). However, given how well these prints worked out, I may have to reprint them all in salted-paper.

The last two images were made on two different trips to Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals located about five miles off the New Hampshire coast. I think that I have previously printed the Gosport Chapel exposure as a cyanotype, but I could not find it with a quick search of my heap of prints!

The difference in tone between the Gosport Chapel print and the other prints shows one of the fun ‘features’ of alternative process printing. I have absolutely no idea as to why the one print turned out different**!!!

* In the coming days, I’ll make larger negatives and print my usual larger size (6×7.5 image on 8×10 inch paper) print. This is my usual method of working. I make small prints to work the kinks out (mostly the dodging and burning) and then I make a larger negative/print. With experience, I ‘guess’ right for salted-paper printing on the first iteration about 80-90% of the time and don’t have to make a second version. This was the case here; all of these images were made from initial negatives.

I may get brave and try printing the Gosport Chapel image larger than I have ever made a salt print (i.e. on 11×15 inch paper). I think that it will hold up well but I have some preparatory work to do before printing that large.

** All of these prints were made in one session. The paper was all from the same batch, it was salted at the same time and stored sealed in the same bag. I sensitized the six sheets of paper one right after the other this morning and made prints one after the other this afternoon. The Gosport Chapel print was made in the middle of the session. Yet the one print is slightly different. Go figure!