New Images from Maine, Gloucester, Vermont and The Arboretum.

More Images from the several day trips that I have gotten to take the past 2 months or so. These were taken in Gloucester, Vermont, Maine and one from the Arboretum.

Found Piles Part 2: Massachusetts, Maine & Vermont

Here are several more piles that I have found scattered throughout my travels these past few months. A few you may recognize from previous post, but they definitely belong in this mini series of mine.

Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Fall 2010 : Photos and Misc.

This is the third and final post with work that I created at Haystack this fall. The photographs were all taken with a 4x5 camera, except for two regular Polaroids. Since my main focus this year was the Lumen Prints and the Polagrams, I didn't really have a main focus with what I wanted to actually photograph while there. I let my mind be very sporadic and just waited to find things that I felt were a little unusual.

The three greenish looking prints are something that I'm calling Chemical Transfers. Before I explain what they are, I do have to credit my new friend Julie Miller, who I just met at Haystack for coming up with the idea for these. She made about 10 of them first and I decided to try a few for myself. These are literally made from the leftover chemical residue that is left behind after I made each Polagram. The Polaroid film I used is this Fuji 100 speed film that is a peel off film, meaning I let the Polaroid develop for about 2 minutes then I peel it off the little chemical packet it is in. After peeling it away, you can still see the image that was just created on the chemical side of the packet. We would then place that chemical side down on a nice piece of thick paper and rub in into the paper for a couple minutes.

This pretty much wraps up all the work that I made there, other than a handmade coptic bound sketch book I made for Amalia, which maybe I will take a picture of and add it to this post down the road. Overall, I felt really productive while at Haystack and all these new ideas are leading me to a lot of other ideas. How wonderful. Stay tuned for some other things I have been working on the past couple months.

Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Fall 2010: Polagrams

One other kind of experimenting I did while at Haystack was working with Polaroids to make photograms (Polagrams). I had only seen a few of these online before and I found instructions on how to make them. It actually ended up being a fairly easy process. Most of my time making these was spent gathering up objects from the forest, and the two minutes it took for each Polaroid to develop before I peel it off. The end results are a little similar to some of my earlier photogram/unique c-print work, but with some interesting differences.

I really enjoyed the idea of having a portable method for making photogram images, and that they would translate a little differently by being more saturated and a lot smaller in size. there is something quite elegant about these images that most common Polaroids do not possess. I for one tend to be a little annoyed with how trendy Polaroid has become these days, but it was nice to do something a little different using them.

Each Image below is a set of three Polagrams that I thought worked best together as a set.

Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Fall 2010 : Lumen Prints

This is post 1 of 3 for the work that I created at The Haystack Mountain School of Craft for eight glorious days that I was able to spend there. Each post will be of the different kinds of image making that I experimented with.

The images in this post are called Lumen Prints, which is basically taking old black and white paper (in this case, Ilford Warmtone Fiber Paper) and laying objects on top of them. I let them sit in the sun light from anywhere between twenty minutes and up to two hours. I then fix and wash them, and then the end result is basically a very unique photogram.

The wonderful thing about making these prints was the fact that there were so many uncontrolled factors in how the end result would be. There was never a way to gage the proper exposure, nor could I really predict the contrast and tonalities. I also made some of them differently then others. Some were put into frames with glass to sandwich the object to the paper, giving me a sharper image. Some I made while it was raining out, and I would just leave the paper exposed to the rain with the objects on top. I would get a different texture and color with that process. A few I even made on the beach, where I submerged the paper into the Atlantic, either with sand or seaweed on top of it.

Stay tuned for a few more stories regarding particular images in this series.