Beekman Street Art Fair, Monhegan, Palladium Prints and Lumen Prints...

Well last Sunday Ellen and I spent the day on Beekman Street, from early to late!  It was a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, and quite a few people came out for the event.  It was the first time I've ever set up for this kind of thing.  Here's a iPod photo of Ellen watching the store.

The day was a lot of fun.  Met a lot of people and had great conversations about photography.  I'm not sure this was a good venue for selling art, as I don't think much was sold anywhere, including by me, but probably a great place for promotion.  I even had a couple of people ask about photography workshops.  I'm hoping to do a few this autumn with another photographer.

On another note, I'm working my way through the rolls and sheets of film taken on Monhegan Island.  Just developing and scanning all this film is quite an undertaking.  I think I'm a little more than halfway done.  This year, I shot a lot of pinhole and zone plate images, in addition to the view camera and medium format camera.  Here are examples of pinhole, zone plate, view camera and medium format (in that order) from the Monhegan photos I've processed so far:

Original File Here

Original File Here

Original File Here

Original File Here

The next major thing coming up is a Palladium Printing Workshop in July with Craig Barber at the Center for Photography in Woodstock.  Platinum/Palladium printing is a time-honored type of printing that in many ways is superior to silver gelatin printing (the type of printing most people do in the darkroom).  Silver gelatin printing became the norm as it was easier and cheaper.  Platinum/Palladium printing, however, has a richness yet delicacy that silver gelatin (and digital images?) don't have.

Palladium printing is accomplished by combining a chemical mixture in a shot glass, then coating paper with the mixture (often using watercolor paper) and allowing this to dry.  Then, a negative is placed on top of the paper and exposed to a UV light source (or the sun) until a faint image appears.  Then it is processed in a variety of chemicals to develop and fix.

While it's hard to describe the difference, or to see it on a computer screen, here is a google search for "palladium prints" to give a good variety.  Here are some famous photographers who used this process:

Major photographers using the technique

• Robert Vano
• Manuel Álvarez Bravo
• Alvin Langdon Coburn
• Lois Conner
• Imogen Cunningham
• Edward S. Curtis
• F. Holland Day
• Frederick H. Evans
• Laura Gilpin
• Frederick Hollyer
• Gertrude Kasebier
• Irving Penn
• Edward Steichen
• Alfred Stieglitz
• Paul Strand
• Edward Weston
• Clarence H. White
• Isabel Muñoz

Finally, I've been dabbling in one-off "Lumen Prints".  These prints are created by taking silver gelatin photo paper (the kind used in the darkroom), placing plant material on top of the paper and glass on top of that.  Then this assembly is left in the sunlight for hours.  The resulting image is then chemically fixed and you have an image like the one below:

Thanks for looking!