Category: Photography

Back from Cantal

We went to Cantal for a week of well deserved vacations (yes that’s true). This is a very beautiful region in the center of France, and we probably fall in love with it. Beautiful landscape, good food, lots of castles or other place to visit. What else one need ? It is a very rural area with an agriculture based on pastoral tradition. With the famous beef of Salers which is also a cheese. In the village of Salers you can also visit the gallery of a very good photographer and any his lith print.

So I’m printing a couple of pictures from my Instagram feed waiting to develop and scan or print the films I shoot during the week. I’m trying as much as possible to get the process reproducible for coffee + mate toning. Not yet 100% accurate, but it’s getting there.

Collodion again and again

No update for quite some time. I’ve been busy on a very specific project with wet plate collodion for the past few month. I’m not yet publishing this as it should be part of an exhibition in November. Now I’m done with this self assignment, I can go back to the regular stuff. And since I really enjoy the wet plate process, and I must continue to improve, I’m parsing stones collected last summer in the mountains and arrange some still life. Scans are awful, sorry for the fingerprints. I’m still looking for a better way to digitize the plates without having reflexions but not scanning them as it shows some dust that is not visible otherwise.

Wandering in the forest

I must say I love going for a walk in the forest or more generally in the countryside. For this little series, it was at the end of the first locked down from March to May 2020. There was still restrictions, we couldn’t go more than 100km from our place. Since my parents lived about 200km away, we decided to meet in the middle. luckily there’s a beautiful region at this place called Perche. So we spent the day walking in a beautiful forest. I think it was also one of the first time I took out my Rolleiflex, and I’m quite pleased with the result.

Do pinhole have vignetting ?

So the answer to the question should obviously be ‘yes’. But, and there’s always a but, you can make the vignetting so strong that it turns to a frame. Here we have a couple of example. How to get such a result ? I took a bakelite camera like a photax. Removed the lens, and replace it with a pinhole. That is a very simple process. You have within less than an hour a pinhole 6×8 with a fully functional shutter. And you can even use a release cable. Ok you have to re-spool the film 120 film on the proper 620 core, that’s the painful part. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a core in the camera you buy, so buy two in order to have enough. Or you can remove matter on a 120, both work. Ok back to the original topic. The specificity of this camera is that the lens is mounted on a helicoid that you need to fully unscrew so that the lens is at the right distance both for focal plane, and to give full coverage of the 6×8 mask. If like me you forget to do that, you’ll end up with a weird frame on your picture. I think I have given up trying to think about it and will just compose with that in mind.

When we used to travel

I can’t even remember clearly when was the last time we went to Indonesia. The file names from the instagram picture are telling me 2018. So I’m browsing through some of the insta pics again, and start a series from that past trip. Here we got one pic from Yogyakarta, and two from Bali. The quality is not so great as what is acceptable on the tiny screen of your phone is clearly awful on a large computer screen. The cyanotype process tends to blur a bit the issue, but that’s not the best. I’ll have to get rid of picture I really like in terms of composition.

Cyanotype on Hahnemühle Moulin du Coq Le rouge, toned with a mix of instant coffee and yerba maté.

New paper

While browsing on FB, there’s this guy in the cyanotype group who uses the paper moulin du coq – le rouge. AS he got some very good results, I decided to give it a try. Best deal I could find was a block of 100 sheets in 24×32 cm. So it better works in the end :). Bottom line is that I don’t think I’m gonna go back to the usual bristol I was using before. The texture is not so smooth, and you have to acidify it beforehand, but the extra step really worth it.

Here I got an example toned in a mix of mate and coffee. I did a very short bleaching set first (just a few seconds) so the Prussian blue actually turn to a more dark purplish color.