This photograph / still life is a tryptic made up of 3 individual paper negatives to make one image.
This has given me an insight into what Henry Fox Talbot may have gone through in order to capture an image, ( although - I dare say it was a lot more difficult back then with a proper Talbotype ).
I set this photograph up thinking it would be a nice easy simple study of six pears, haha, little did I know. It took me almost a day to shoot this, although, if the weather had been better and more steady i.e. totally cloudy or just blue sky, then it would have made my job easier. It was one of these days - constantly changing from cloudy to blue sky and back again.
I gave the Ilford Multigrade paper a one second flash under an enlarger at f22 at 3' high in order to give me more tones in the paper and to prevent the highlights burning out too much. Doing this also changed the papers ASA / ISO from 1asa to roughly 6.4asa.
I decided to shoot this image as 3 separate negatives because it gives me a larger image size and I like the idea of making the image with 3 negs to give the image a bit more tension and of course interest - I'm shooting a whole project like this just now.
Each paper negative was shot at f16 with an old Carl Zeiss Jena 15cm lens ( which I believe they used to shoot movies and stills in Hollywood ) on my wooden vageeswari camera.
The lens has no shutter so I had to use my hand over the lens as a shutter. Each paper negative was exposed for between 16 mins and 30 mins and then there was the running back and forth to the darkroom to see if the negative had the same tones as the previous negative in order to try an get them all to look similar in tone, so you can imagine how the light kept changing with roughly 30 mins in between each shot taken, loading up the next neg and getting it ready for exposure, the ones that didn't work and had to do it again etc etc, so yes, almost a full day for this one image.
The photo that I've posted here is just a scan of the 3 paper negatives and joined together in photoshop but the final photograph will be printed as a salt print or an albumen print.
To see the photograph in a larger size please click on the image.
This has given me an insight into what Henry Fox Talbot may have gone through in order to capture an image, ( although - I dare say it was a lot more difficult back then with a proper Talbotype ).
I set this photograph up thinking it would be a nice easy simple study of six pears, haha, little did I know. It took me almost a day to shoot this, although, if the weather had been better and more steady i.e. totally cloudy or just blue sky, then it would have made my job easier. It was one of these days - constantly changing from cloudy to blue sky and back again.
I gave the Ilford Multigrade paper a one second flash under an enlarger at f22 at 3' high in order to give me more tones in the paper and to prevent the highlights burning out too much. Doing this also changed the papers ASA / ISO from 1asa to roughly 6.4asa.
I decided to shoot this image as 3 separate negatives because it gives me a larger image size and I like the idea of making the image with 3 negs to give the image a bit more tension and of course interest - I'm shooting a whole project like this just now.
Each paper negative was shot at f16 with an old Carl Zeiss Jena 15cm lens ( which I believe they used to shoot movies and stills in Hollywood ) on my wooden vageeswari camera.
The photo that I've posted here is just a scan of the 3 paper negatives and joined together in photoshop but the final photograph will be printed as a salt print or an albumen print.
To see the photograph in a larger size please click on the image.
