Maine Workshop, Postscript

The workshop officially ended Friday night with a great multimedia presentation of work from all of the workshops that week. It was pretty cool to see several of my images projected on a theater sized screen.

But thanks to the generosity of our instructor Tillman Crane, there was a wonderful unexpected bonus in store for some of us on Saturday morning. We were invited to visit his home and studio in nearby Camden, Maine, for a demonstration of platinum-palladium printing.

The process is on one hand complex, yet in other ways fairly straighforward. First, Tillman mixes small amounts of several chemicals, including platinum and palladium, into a solution that is coated onto the paper. By varying the amount of each element, he can control contrast and tone in the print. Once the paper is dry (he uses a hair dryer to dry the paper in just a couple of minutes!) he sets up the negative and paper in a vacuum contact printing frame and exposes the print in a specially made light box where the paper is exposed to high intensity ultra-violet light.

From there, the print is developed in a process that is very similar to the processing of a silver print except that the chemicals are different.

Platinum-palladium prints have a different look from traditional silver prints. My perception is that while the prints are rich in tone, the blacks are typically not quite as deep, but the tonal transitions are beautifully smooth. The prints generally have a slight warm tone to them but that is controllable by the chemical mix in the emulsion.

The darkroom for platinum printing is not nearly as dark as in a standard darkroom for silver printing. The emulsion is primarily sensitive to UV light so the room is lit with 40-watt “bug” lights and the paper is perfectly safe. I realized that for old-time platinum printers – the process was invented in the 1880s – the only way to expose the paper was to set the print frame out in the sun!

All in all, it was a great week. I thoroughly enjoyed Tillman’s workshop and the others in the class were diverse, interesting, and very talented. While I learned much from Tillman, I also got valuable insights from my classmates.

I waited a long time to take the plunge into one of these workshops. Having done so, I am already hoping to return for another, and another.

Maine Workshop, Day 5

The last day of the workshop dawned dark, gray, and rainy. Undaunted, our class traveled to Fort Knox. No, not in Kentucky, but Fort Knox State Park in Maine. No gold here, but a massive structure of granite and brick that was built to guard approaches to Bangor, Maine near the mouth of the Penobscot River.

Due to the rain, we worked mostly inside the fort, which featured many arched passageways and long, dark corridors. Many of the spaces were lit by narrow gun ports. The soft subdued light filtering in from the outside was ideal for long exposure images of the interior.

The interesting light also gave some opportunities for some HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.

This is a place where I could return again and again, finding new things on every trip. Unfortunately, it’s a day and a half drive from home, so I will have just have to find a way to take more Maine workshops to get me closer for at least a few days at a time.

Maine Workshop Days 3 & 4

Wednesday I was dispatched Rockport to photograph a park. It was a pretty ordinary park, but my assignment was to find an extraordinary image anyway. I can’t say that I was particularly successful, but I did a number of shots of the white birch trees that I always find attractive due to their textures.

Then after lunch we were off to the obligatory lighthouse, where I saw first hand the “rocky Maine coast.” It had been heavy overcast all morning but as we arrived the clouds started to break up. With a fresh breeze off the ocean, the temperature became comfortable and it ended up being a delightful outing.

Thursday brought more rain and cloudy weather but we were undaunted. We visited the Olsen House in Cushing, Maine, a favorite with the Workshops. Once the home of Maine Artist Andrew Wyeth, this old farmhouse has been preserved as a museum. The cloudy weather provided wonderful soft light through the windows and doors of the house and everyone found much to photograph. Here are just a small sampling of the images I found.

I’ll be working up many more from the Olsen house over the next few months.

Maine Workshop Day 2

I’m making two posts today to try to get caught up. I was hoping to update this day to day during the workshop but each day was full of class discussion, shooting, and editing. It was a very intense but rewarding week.

The second day of the workshop got beyond photographing my room and the next assignment was photographing the Rockport Library. I can’t say that I acquired any “extraordinary” images there, but I enjoyed the process. It was a very nice small town library with a touch of nostalgia.

The children’s section was especially nice.

After lunch, we piled into two cars and went off to Elmer’s Barn, a truly extraordinary place! Having prowled “antique” and downright junk stores in many places, this place was the ultimate. In about two hours, we were barely able to scratch the surface.

As I was wandering around this place, I definitely saw it in black and white.

The old car was gradually being swallowed up by the weeds.

Inside was unimaginable chaos, but one got the impression that the old gentleman who ran the place knew just about everything that was in there and where to find it – not to mention its value.

Little gems like this were everywhere, in among the piles of old tools, rusty hardware, old bottles, and who knows what.

Maine Workshop, Day 1

I returned from Rockport to Braintree last Saturday having completed a great workshop with Tillman Crane.

The workshop, entitled “Extraordinary Images in Ordinary Places,” was not about technical things or even about technique. It was more about how you think about looking for images.

There were six of us in the class and we photographed different things every day and followed up by critique and discussion.

Each day, we were assigned “ordinary” places to photograph. The locations ranged from local parks, to locations around the Workshops campus. My first assignment was to photograph my room! Daunted that I was – this was a very plain vanilla motel style room – I went in with determination to come out with something. What I came out with was so abstract that nobody could tell what it was until I showed a different angle.

Then I moved the camera a bit …

My idea was to do a study of the way the light reflected off the different surfaces.

Not exactly “high art” but still an interesting exercise.