Alt Process Work

I've been getting back into what has been referred as "Alternative Processes".  These are historic photographic processes that have been popular at one time and died out for one reason or another.

I took a refresher weekend at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts school this past fall.  These are two of the prints I did.  The one on the left is a Platinum print on vellum paper and the one on the right is a Van Dyke Brown print on watercolor paper.  They are currently hanging along with some other work in the school itself.

I tend to like these processes for a couple of different reasons.  First, each print is hand coated and exposed to a negative.  While the negative is reusable, the process still creates a unique print due to variations in coating, exposing and developing.    The second reason is that I like the look.  It's different from the usual digital stuff being thrown about these days.  You can attempt to recreate the look in Photoshop, but I have yet to see it successfully done.

I've started working on a couple of processes at home.  Specifically Cyanotype and Platinum.    So far, I'm in the middle of calibrating my printer and developing processes.  While cyanotype is one of the cheaper processes around, printing using Platinum can be expensive.  I want to get the process down pat, so I don't have a lot of waste.  Hopefully, I can start the actual printing soon.

More when I have it.