Curation notes for practice

In this category I have included all the posts that relate to my creative practice.  Some of them have been included as references for other learning outcomes, so the most relevant posts for the evaluating and presenting my project outcome are:

My negatives
Where I talk about applying the Zone System to my negatives in order to get maximum tonality and show some examples of this work

Digital long exposures
Where I show my research on digital noise in the digital photograph and why I think that it will be a good idea for me to use film photography

Merging of exposures
Where I present my first success at merging two bracketed exposures of an image

Chemical/ Mechanical
Where I talk about my failed attempt at long exposure photography with film and I decide to experiment with both digital and mechanical photography

Photo Intaglio – Print Making

After looking at the Bechers and Polidori and their approach to documenting. I am considering making a typography print with my photographs. The typography will consist of a series of different valves in machinery from the 19th century arranged in a grid shape. The images will be digital and will go through the process of HDR (merging 3 exposures with Photomatix) and then synthesis (combining 2 exposures in Photoshop).

This is an example of the Becher’s typology:

Once the images are ready, I will digitally produce and print a positive – film positive paper -  in order to use it in the process of Photo Intaglio.

Photo intaglio goes back to the origins of photography. In the 1820′s, Niepce invented a photomechanical process using sensitized pewter plate. He called the images produced from these plates heliographs. Daguerre and Fox Talbot made their own contributions a few years later, and photogravure (a form of photo intaglio) became a commercial process for reproduction in the late nineteenth century. Emerson, Stieglitz and many others made editions of their work using this process. Nowadays photogravure has been replaced by more modern processes as the chemicals used were very toxic. The form of Photo Intaglio I am going to research will be Photo-etching with two different methods: Aquatint for zinc vaporjet plates and Solar plates which have a light sensitive polymer on a steel backing that is developed and etched with water.

The aim of this process is to take the image of a referent from the time of the industrial revolution trough the sophisticated procedures of digital photo imaging and bring it to the traditional and laboured process of manual print making.

Zinc Vaporjet Plates

The process I followed:

1. Exposure:

1. Film Positive face up on the glass
2. Plate face down- make sure not to touch the surface
3. Vacuum lid on, clamp it and turn on
4. Expose to UV light for 30 light units
5. Remove and develop – MX developer – for about 30 seconds
6. Dry and expose again (without the film positive) for another 30 light units in order to fix the image

2. De-scum on the sink by pouring the liquid over the plate and rubbing with cotton

3. Edging : 1:20 Nitric Acid for zinc fine line. The chemical bites the plate and it needed to  be rubbed with cotton again.

4. Dry

5. Aquatint:

1. Insert the plate in the machine with the resin dust from 5 to 8 minutes
2. Melt the resin to form a fine and even coat, making sure not too heat the plate too much and that the flames don’t go over the edge of the plate
3. Dip the plate back into the Nitric Acid and rub with cotton for about 2 minutes
4. Take it out and use methylated spirit to get the acid off
5. Dry

6. Bevel the edges of the plate with a metal file – about 2mm bevel

7. Inking:

1. Clean the inking area with methylated spirit
2. Get ink – 55985 has a high contrast hard edge black, 71303 is a warm black, F66 is  a soft black. Spread the ink thin on the table with a roller
3. Ink the plate
4. Blotch with newsprint and when the layer of ink is thinner rub with tissue paper

8. Printing:

1. Sommerset paper has a printing side, it is the one where you can read the watermark. For wet printing soak printing side down for 10 minutes. Always keep the paper in the same position to remember what side is the printing one.
2. Take out and take water excess off by putting in between the cards and pressing with rubber roller.
3. On the print press put some tissue paper down or acrylic sheet with marks. Lay the inked vaporjet plate on it and put the printing paper on top. Cover with tissue paper and blankets and feed through the press.
4. Dry print by putting it between tissue paper and insert in blotting paper.
5. Clean plate with methylated spirit

Solar Plates – Toyobo Polymer Print Plates

Process I followed so far:

1. Exposure:

1. Film Positive face up on the glass
2. Plate face down- make sure not to touch the surface
3. Vacuum lid on, clamp it and turn on
4. Expose to UV light for 30 light units
5. Remove and wash in warm water, sponge rub at the same time and change the water as it gets dirty
6. Dry

This has been my first attempt to work with this techniques. The vaporjet plate was a nice process  but the result was a little dotty plus I had some problem with the plate getting more ink than it should and printing black blobs all over. The solar plate might give me a smoother result. Also, the film positive I used (45lpi-round-27.5∘) hasn’t given me the result I expected on the aquatint process. I have been recommended to have a positive with a higher number of lpi (lines per inch) and instead of round pattern have an stochastic pattern (=random pattern). I have yet to print the solar plate although I have certain reservations about the result as quite a few parts of the plate have no texture. I have read that the plate should be exposed for a second time to UV light with an aquatint screen to retain the grain…that step was excluded. I don’t really know the right answers yet but once I print this second plate I will asses the result and seek advice from the technicians to see what is my next step.

Low Hall Pump House

Low Hall Pump House is a Grade II listed building constructed in 1885 it houses Marshall C Class engines from 1896.

Information from www.leavalleyexperience.co.uk

The building was constructed of London stock brick with blue engineering bricks around the doors and windows.

The two Hayward Tyler steam pumps that moved the effluent were situated in a pit at the front end of the building. The steam power was generated by two boilers situated in the left bay.

It is also recorded in the Councils minutes of 1885 that Tangyes of Birmingham also installed a single horizontal engine for the cost of £420 which was situated next to the pit, however, what this engine was installed for still remains a mystery today despite research.

Accommodation for the chief engine room attendant was provided in No. 1 Farm Cottages in Acacia Road at a rent of 10/- per week.

The pump pit was filled in during the 1970s and is currently being excavated

The Pump House 1896

In 1896 the two 1885 bays were enlarged and a third bay was added to the left of the building. The Marshall C class steam engines, boilers, and plant equipment were also added at this time; however no plans of the 1896 extension have been found to-date.

Tenders were invited by the Council in early 1896 for designs on a way to connect the new Marshalls engines with the original 1885 Hayward Tyler steam pumps.

We have presumed that this must have been successful and the engines did in fact power the pumps via overhead line shafting, of which can still be seen today.

In addition to this various pieces of workshop equipment were placed in the pump house. The engines also provided the power to drive these machines. Originally fuelled by coal, the steam plant was converted in the early 1900s to work from domestic refuse which was burnt elsewhere on the site.

However, by the early 1970s the general state of the boiler made the raising of steam then a rather haphazard affair. The installation of electrically powered pumps then sealed the engines’ fate, and a large part of the 1885 buildings was demolished The Great Eastern Railway also provided a connection to the site from Lea Bridge Road. The site also had a small locomotive shed and locomotive at one. From 1928 the pumps moved sewerage directly into the LCC sewerage system. time.

The Pump House Today

The pump house today contains what are believed to be the only surviving pair of “C” class horizontal steam engines built by the Lincolnshire firm of William Marshall Sons & Co.

•  The engines are also Grade II listed along with the steel beams within the building.

•  The installation of these engines and a boiler cost £220.

Today, Marshall’s are best remembered as builders of traction engines, but in their nineteenth century heyday the firm produced an extraordinarily diverse range of products, from threshing machines to tea plantation equipment.

The two engines bear the makers’ numbers 27834 and 27835 and were installed in the pump house during the spring of 1897, being steamed for the first time in May of that year.

The engines were not designed to (and cannot be) run together – rather, one engine would have worked for two weeks running continuously whilst the other received maintenance.

It would have taken about forty minutes to disconnect one engine from the flywheel and to connect the other. This process was generally carried out in the early hours of the morning when the sewerage flow was at its slackest.

The Low Hall Manor and the Farm

The area now occupied by the Museum was purchased from the Bosanquet family in 1877 by Walthamstow Urban District Council.

Prior to this, the 200 acre site had been farmed from at least the early mediaeval period (traces of a moat which surrounded the mediaeval manor house and farm survived until comparatively recently).

Although the site is therefore of considerable antiquity, today nothing remains above ground of the original seventeenth century manor house and farm as they were both completely destroyed by a flying bomb in 1944.

In 1997 the site was excavated by MOLAS (Museum of London Archaeology Service), and a number of interesting artefacts were found. It is proposed to display some of these at the museum in the future.

My practice

This is a close up of a valve from William Marshall Sons & Co. “C” class horizontal steam engine. I took three different exposures and using Photomatix – for info on this technique see my high dynamic range post – I created a tone mapped image, which I then converted into black&white.

Looking at this picture and thinking about the New Objectivity movement, I should mention in this post Wolfgang Sievers (1913 -2007), a german industrial photographer which work followed these set of aesthetics. At the start of his career, his photography was imbued with the Bauhaus ethos and philosophy of the New Objectivity he had learned in Berlin, combined with a socialist belief in the inherent dignity of labour. His photographs were often quite theatrical, as he commonly photographed industrial machinery at night, isolating details with artificial light and posing workers for heightened effect. This can be seen in ‘Gears for Mining Industry’ (1967), perhaps his most well known single image. This approach was extraordinarily influential in Australian post-war commercial photography.

Gears for mining industry. 1967

Aluminium ingots, Alcoa of Australia at Point Henry near Geelong, Victoria, 1970

Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, Burnie, Tasmania, 1956

Largely self-taught as a photographer, Wolfgang Sievers lived in Portugal from 1934 to 1935 and his early work was commemorated by a retrospective exhibition in Lisbon in 1999. He returned to Germany in 1936, and studied at the Contempora School for Modern Applied Arts (a successor to the Bauhaus), and also taught there briefly. He left Germany in June 1938 and by October had set up as a photographer in Melbourne, attracting influential patrons such as Maie Casey. Talking about photographing architecture he said: “The task of a responsible photographer is not to discover some bits and pieces or some interesting perspectives but to interpret a great work of art in his own way”.

Printing in the darkroom

Finally I have a big print of my picture. After a few test strips I printed this picture size 51x51cm I used a filter gradient number 3 and 30 seconds of exposure at f/8. Using the zone system and accounting for reciprocity failure meant that the picture had very good tonality. As a personal taste I wanted to make the contrast a little “punchier” so considering the distance in between the enlarger and the paper I used filter gradient 3. The quality was quite good but at the same time I think that I would like to use other films apart from Rolley 50 iso.

Tilbury

On the 25th of May I visited Tilbury, which is a renowned town for its docks. I thought I was going to find more structures from the 19th century but the site had been renovated in the 1960s.

A bit about Tilbury Dock history:

Tilbury Dock was built by the East and West India Docks Company in 1833, it’s situated more than 40 kilometres (25 miles) downriver from London.
The docks benefited from the connection with the London, Tilbury and Southend railway line, allowing rapid distribution of goods to the capital and the rest of the country.

The Tilbury Docks opened for business just as steam vessels began to take over the shipping trade. The location of the dock system on the Thames and the size of the basins meant that Tilbury was a very attractive dock to use. Although for decades after their opening, they were relatively underused.

When the Tilbury Docks first opened, in 1886, it traded in a number of goods, including madeira brought in by the West Africa Line; casks of sausage skins packed in brine and India chutney. Materials such as bales of jute and packaged timber and wood pulp also passed through the docks.

During the 1930s grain ships of 50,000 tons were regularly unloading at Tilbury. There were also the usual lighters and barges, ready to transfer the goods into the city.

In contrast to other docks in London, the luxury liner trade used Tilbury Docks. Passengers embarked and disembarked at Tilbury, making use of the good rail links and staying at the local hotels. During the war, Tilbury was used to convert the liners into armed merchant cruisers.

During the 20th century, Tilbury Docks became well known for their grain trade.
Towards the end of the 1960s, Tilbury Docks underwent a £30 million program of improvements.  The grain terminal, which opened in 1969, was one of the fastest discharging installations in the world, at 2000 tons per hour. The grain silo on land had a 100,000 ton capacity and there were adjacent private flour mills ready to process the grain.

The 1960s improvements also enabled the large ocean-going cellular container ships to dock and be turned around in 36 hours. These refits enabled the docks to continue in business significantly longer than other dock systems in London.

My negatives

The aim when I took these pictures was to learn about how to photograph interiors and get the maximum tonality out of  the negatives. I am learning about the Zone System which is very useful to know if you want to achieve detail in highlights and shadows and also I am developing the film pushing the amount of time (or giving N+1 development) so that the upper zones or highlights have been pushed up a further zone but the shadows and lower zones stay where they are achieving this way a greater tonality.

I have a diagram that explains what happens  to the tones with different developing times (the roman numerals refer to the different tonal zones):

To get an even better tonality I developed the film for 20 minutes and the developer was diluted in a 1-100 proportion. I used Rodinal which was patented by Dr. Momme Andresen in 1891.  It is the oldest continuously-produced developer formula in the world. At high dilutions Rodinal works as a compensating developer, which means that as the chemicals get exhausted they stop working on the highlights but continue working on the mid tones, thus preventing blown highlights.

There is an useful website to get correct times for developing, it is www.digitalthruth.com

The film I used is Rollei Pan25  which, according to the ad, offers outstanding resolution, sharpness and edge contrast, coupled with extremely fine grain and a long tonal range. This film is ideal where maximum quality is required, and its clear base makes it perfect for scanning. The only fault is that the film is quite thin and it curls a lot making it difficult to scan the negatives an quite fiddly in general.

I took this pictures with a classic medium format camera ( Hasselblad Super Wide). This is the technical data for the following images:
Colour Darkroom:

Meter readings: the floor was on zone II and the sink on zone VI
Aperture: f11, 6 minutes
Sculpture workshop:

Meter readings: the girder was on zone II and the sink on zone VI
Aperture: f11, 150 seconds
Type room:

Meter readings: the back of the room was on zone II and the highlight under the fluorescent light on zone VII
Aperture: f11

Digital long exposure

When I tried to take some long exposure photographs with digital camera I found myself limited by the camera I was using. The noise in the digital camera is produced by different factors such us the ISO you choose and the thermal conditions. There are a lot of articles on the web talking about noise in digital cameras and how the fact that having more pixels doesn’t necessarily mean having a better image as they can produce more noise, so there are quite a few different factors to consider when using a digital camera such as lenses, pixel number and sensor size. Some articles talk  about how digital noise could be solved by having a bigger sensor which only the most expensive cameras have. ( http://photo.net/equipment/digital/sensorsize/) . The problem I find with the information about digital cameras is that the technology is moving so fast that most information is obsolete in a year or two.

I found some basic notions about Noise in digital cameras on this website: www.cambridgeincolour.com

Random noise is characterized by intensity and color fluctuations above and below the actual image intensity.  There will always be some random noise at any exposure length and it is most influenced by ISO speed.  The pattern of random noise changes even if the exposure settings are identical

Fixed pattern noise includes what are called “hot pixels,” which are defined as such when a pixel’s intensity far surpasses that of the ambient random noise fluctuations.  Fixed pattern noise generally appears in very long exposures and is exacerbated by higher temperatures.  Fixed pattern noise is unique in that it will show almost the same distribution of hot pixels if taken under the same conditions (temperature, length of exposure, ISO speed).

A couple of examples of long exposures I took with digital cameras, the light source on the first image were 3 LED lights and on the second one it was natural evening light:

Canon G9, 400ISO, f8, 15”

Canon D400, 100ISO, f22, 15”

An “old” article (1991) examines the image resolution difference between film and digital: http://www.users.qwest.net/~rnclark/scandetail.htm#digicamres2

Although it is old information and much better photographic cameras are available in the market I believe it is still relevant when considering the use of a medium format film camera. In my case, I find that a medium format camera is more accesible to me than the high end digital cameras for purely financial reasons, and the image quality/resolution you can achieve with it, it’s said to be similar to the one you would achieve with a 30megapixel camera. This, of course, would be achieved by using a high end negative scanner (or a drum scanner). Still, if the final product is going to be a print it makes sense to me that I should start by taking my pictures with a medium format camera.

This may not be the clearest of examples but I thought it was worthy to observe the difference in tonality between my two pictures, No. 1 digital photograph and No.2 medium format photograph.

Merging of exposures

After looking at HDR photography I had a look through my recent pictures and I was very happy to discover that I had two different exposures of almost the same image. I decided to work on the composition below in Photoshop. I wanted to see what kind of result I would get by merging two different exposures, looking to achieve a certain similarity to those achieved by the techniques of night time photography. The result of this composed image has little to do with a composition from a bracketed exposure for HDR as there is a greater difference between the  exposure value (EV) of my two original files to what you would get with a shoot at -2 EV, 0, +2 EV.

When I started working on my image, I first had to match the different perspectives of the image which I did using the transformation tools.  Then I started to merge both pictures till the background of the lighter exposure was erased and the overexposed picture came through. I also added a black gradient to the background image to give the foreground a more surreal lighting. I have also discovered that an overexposed version of your image mixed with a proper exposure in HDR may help in reducing the shadow noise in your photograph, this is a good find. To sum up, it was a long and involved process, one that was rewarding; I am happy with the process and the finished image and I hope the result will have the ability to transmit a sense of time encapsulation that will raise questions about the subject matter.

Original images:

1/200 shutter,  f/3.5,  ISO 125                           1/800 shutter,  f/3.5,  ISO 125

Chemical/mechanical

Well, my first attempt with the Pentax asahi 6×7 camera was not to be a succesful one. I went to Area 10 in Peckam with the medium format camera and tried to take some long exposure photographs. My film was a Rolley 25 ISO. I had a good trypod and another camera with a built in flash. The light conditions where extremely low (practically darkness). The idea behind my experiment was to illuminate certain parts and objects of the building with the flash light, leaving the remainder of the frame in the dark and therefore composing my image as if I was painting with light. The time of the exposures went from 4 to 6 minutes, the aperture was f8, and during the time of the exposure the flash was fired up to 9 times onto one single object. After the experiment finished I developed the film and unfortunately I had no results. Thinking back, and after talking to John Whapham (photography technician at Camberwell), I came to the conclusion that the flash light that I used wasn’t strong enough, the light sensitivity of the film being 25ISO  did not allow the negative to respond favorably to the quantity of light recieved. So, I’ll consider this first attempt void.

I think I need to research a little more about the possibilities of digital photography and maybe try to use digital as well as mechanical photography in my project.

Walk down the Thames riverside

I took a boat trip down the Thames from Greenwich towards the Thames barrier, seeking out architectural and other structures of an industrial nature. Some vestiges from the industrial era where still around, a few buildings and artifacts along the riverside. Most of them were now disused. Unfortunately a lot of pre-existing structures had been knocked down and the land upon which they had stood now redeveloped. I took some pictures of that which I found. I quite liked the feeling of desolation I encountered around the area. It was a bit like being in no-mans land; austere industrial shapes set against the cold afternoon sky.  On the walk back I talked to a caretaker and managed to get a phone number for the generation manager of Greenwich Power Station which is next to the Maritime Museum. I plan to contact him to get permission to photograph the building. So all and all it was quite a successful trip.

I have added some more of my images to My Photographs page on the Deptford docks section. I am also going to frame these images and submit them for the ‘FEEDBACK’ show at the ‘House Gallery’. In this show we (MA Digital Arts alumni/ae) intend to put work that will be relevant to our final show. I guess it is a little early in my project but nonetheless it will be very interesting to get feedback on my work.

As a reference to austere industrial shapes I shall mention the work of the Bechers, in their work they photographed and cataloged a vast amount of industrial buildings that were in danger of being demolished as they were no longer used for their function. Their work was very methodical, it was a life time assignment, a tribute to all anonymous industrial architecture.