California-based film photographer Ryan Jacobs makes entertaining and educational videos covering a wide variety of topics related to analog photography and printmaking. Focusing more on the art of photography than on gear, this channel goes behind the scenes, looking more closely at traditional ways of making a photograph. “Silver and Platnium,” from the channel’s handle, is a reference to the two most important metals in Ryan’s printmaking workflow; he tends to favor Silver Gelatin prints or Platinum prints (platinotypes).
No worries! It depends what kind of enlarger (machine thing :) ) that you have. Mine has those little magenta and yellow dials, but yours might not. You might have to buy a set of filters that can be inserted into your enlarger; different enlargers use different size filters so make sure you have the correct size. Where I use magenta 200, you'll use a #5 magenta filter. Where I use yellow 80, you'll use a #0 yellow filter.
Yessss please pass it on! And thanks for subscribing! I’ve been shooting a ton lately so recent videos are mostly on location, but I’m hoping to do some more darkroom tutorials like this in the future
Haha I bet that’s actually possible, maybe one day I’ll try it. That is actually the cross-section of a 2000+ year old fallen redwood 😮 - they display it at the trailhead
Yeah it’s pretty strong, especially at 1:4. I try to use it outside if I can. I’ve never had cause to really investigate sepia toning or split toning in my own work, but there may come a time! I’ll post a video if that happens
Nice intro, Ryan. I assume you're using RC papers, from the short hypo clearing time you gave. I'll add a couple of comments. Different papers can respond very differently to selenium (and other toners). Dilution, toning speed, time/temp can all affect the result; even the printer developer can affect it, though two untoned prints developed in different developers might appear identical. For instance, Ilford Warmtone fiber base, in 1:19 selenium at about 68 F, shows only a slight change in the lower middle values until several minutes have passed. Fomatone, another warm-tone paper fiber paper, tones so fast at 1:19 that I use 1:80 (!) to have better control, and still rarely go beyond 2.5 minutes, unless a very full toning is desired. (If so, with the Ilford, I might use 1:9 or even a lower dilution to spend less time per print.) Most papers today are variable contrast, using a high-contrast and a low-contrast emulsion, which typically tone at different rates. This can produce a print with far more toning effect in the lower values. The result can be a print with two "colors", an effect the artist may or may not find desirable, depending on subject, extent, and tonal distribution.
Congratulations on your upcoming exhibition. Are you really using platinum as your metal in the sensitizer, the warmth of the resulting print makes me think you are using palladium, not platinum?
I was pretty confused when you said you were going by stops here, since a stop would be twice as long. I think what you're actually doing is rounded off half stops. So it would be (2^2)=4, (2^2.5)=5.6, (2^3)=8, (2^3.5)=11.3, (2^4)=16, (2^4.5)=22.6 for exact half stops, and then you've rounded these off.
Lovely work and well deserved of an exhibition. I would be interested to see how you make your digital negative. What process do you use for obtaining the ink colour/density before you print it on the pictorico paper? Many thanks for your content.
Thanks! I get my chemistry and Photoshop curves from Bostick & Sullivan, and I follow their digital negative instructions pretty much to the letter. As far as print settings, they suggest a color density of +20% (using an Epson printer). They also suggest adding yellow (color adjustment +75 vertical), which seems to help keep the highlights from getting too much UV exposure.
I understand the intention and the procedure but I think there is an error in the time calculations, increments of one step with a base exposure of 4 seconds would be 8, 16, 32, 64, 128...
Very nice work. Photographic exposure is logarithmic, not linear. Note that the shutter speeds go in approximate doubling and the /f stops are powers of the square root of two. Rather that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 minutes, you could use 1, 1:25, 2, 2:49, 4, 5:39 and 8. This will give a more uniform gradation of density.
Such a wonderfully informative video! Thank you for answering the question that I've had for a while about whither you can use the sun as your light source for platinum prints! Though I'm just beginning my journey in alternate photography I look forward to watching more of your informative videos.
You can expose either with a sun or with a UV box. The big advantages of a UV box are that it’s consistent and you can print in winter. But there are downsides: the cost, the footprint of the machine in your studio, the size limit (you can only make a print as big as your box will allow). Also, exposing in the sun allows you to dodge and burn. I prefer to use the sun for exposure whenever possible, so I try to save up my platinum printing for the summer. I’m so glad the video was helpful, and that’s great that you’re exploring alt process printing! I was surprised at how little video content there was when I got started with platinotype, so I just bought a kit, followed the instructions, and learned as I went. Hopefully I can help others by documenting my process.
J'apprécie particulièrement les portraits à la chambre photo 10 x 12 c m ou 4 x 5 i n c h, on fait des très beaux portraits sans aucune granulation, et avec une certaine netteté.et une certaine profondeur,et avec le papier photo traditionnel, que l'on peut développer jusqu'au bout, on aura un travail d'une très grande qualité.
You just save me from cutting unimaginable amount of test stips and save's a lot of paper! thank you very much. Pawn Star's be like: Best I can do it's a sub.
Thanks so much! The paper for these platinum prints is Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag. The other paper I sometimes use is Bergger COT-320, which is slightly warmer but behaves similarly otherwise
Good question. The fastest this lens fires is 1/125. We’re in the shade, so at that speed, ambient light would be f/8 or so. I need the strobe to be significantly more powerful so that the camera captures the flash, not the ambient. The other nice side benefit is that the deeper depth of field gives the subject a little more freedom to move around without worrying that she’ll end up out of focus. The major disadvantage is that you can see the wrinkles on the backdrop a bit, but that wasn’t a huge concern for me with this particular portrait.
To get some DOF? With 8x10 "sensor" you have 0.13 crop factor ;-) So in terms of DOF your f/45 will convert into something like f/6.3 on 35mm camera ;)
Basic, straight, I love it ! Thanks for recording the interaction with the person in front of the camera while taking the image - this is an important part!
Object brightness, aperture, time, makes exposure. The goal is to match exposure required by your film. With film you can't change iso on the same film. À film requires one level of exposure, your role is to play with light aperture and time to match this requirement.
Flashbacks. Nice work. 30 minutes to "develop" seemed long at first, but then I thought, oh, he must reference the entire wet process: developer, [stop bath,] fixation, rinsing? You must know all the following, but it could make for a next video, maybe. I'd argue that the slowness is not in the tray you use, because the entire process will need some 30 minutes, however "we" had upright tanks that we could hang a number of negatives in so as to process them all together. You use the metal frame hanging in the drying cabinet and that frame works upright in the wet too. So, yes, the per negative slowness follows from the tray that accommodates only one negative at a time. Another thing is that the film developer solution has its chemicals sucked out of the water surrounding the film into the emulsion. This robs a thin layer of water around the film from chemicals and as long as you don't move the tray, diffusion that goes slow will bring unused chemicals into that "empty" space. Some photographers in the past (and still today) could religiously process their film that way but it would take much more time. Reasons to play with "motion" - how wild and how many times - during developing: it impacts contrast/gradation, contrast envelope, and may impact "sensitivity", plus it may impact grain. With such standing tanks, we would "replenish" the solution after each use, up to a number of times, because each use consumed part of the chemicals in the water. That's less precise and more economical, than taking a new solution every time. In the video, you don't go into tilt/shift and stay away from Scheimpflug's Law, not a problem (although a mathemagician would argue you do use that law because of an axiom in geometry), but also good to point at. You can use a simple large format camera without all the hassle. As you exposed the landscape image in full daylight for a relatively long time, you must have stopped down the aperture a lot - what aperture number was it at? And, as you stopped that lens down a lot, what lens was it? "We" had so-called " 8"*10" " lenses, way back that only gave an image circle large enough when stopped down a lot. At full open they might do 5"*7" or 4"*5" without having to worry. Which is to say, did you stop down purely for Depth of Field (DoF), or to arrive in the lens's operational zone? Do you have a 4"*5" adapter-back with the 8"*10"? Then you can do what Yousuf Karsh [1] did in most of his portraits - he used a Kodak 14" ("Commercial Ektar") lens cropped and that gave him "portrait distance" in the case of half or head shots. As the 14" at 8"*10" compares to your 35mm "full frame" camera's "nifty fifty", I would also point to the focal length of 355.6 mm (=14"). At 8"*10" you would need some 600mm for an image angle comparable to 85mm with 35mm and a 350mm or 600mm has shallow DoF even at f/22. [1] Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) - during his career as portrait photographer held 15,312 sittings, producing over 250,000 negatives. Some of the sitters were: Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Alberto Giacometti, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli _AKA_ Pope John XXIII, Anita Ekberg, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu _AKA_ Mother Teresa, Ansel Adams, Apollo 11: Neil A. Armstrong & Michael Collins & Edwin E. 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr., Audrey Hepburn, Bernard Shaw, Brigitte Bardot, Carl Jung, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret _AKA_ Le Corbusier, Christian Dior, Clark Gable, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth II Queen of England, Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, Frank Lloyd Wright, George Bernard Shaw, Georgia O'Keefe, Gerard Depardieu, Grace Kelly _AKA_ Princess Grace, Gregory Peck, Helen Keller and Polly Thompson, I.M. Pei, Jacqueline Kennedy, Jacques Cousteau, Jan Smuts, Jessye Norman, Joan Miró, John and Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Karol Józef Wojtyła _AKA_ Pope John Paul II, King Faisal, Lord Beaverbrook, Man Ray, Marc Chagall, Marcel Marceau, Marian Anderson, Martha Graham, Martin Luther King Jr., Mikhail Gorbachev, Mstislav Rostropovich, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Casals, Pablo Picasso, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Robert Oppenheimer, Sophia Loren, Ulla Jacobsen, W.H. Auden, Walt Disney, Winston Churchill.
Yeah I've played around a little with stand development. I also have one of those CatLABS clips that can do 3 sheets of 8x10 at once, but it's such a pain to load that I'm always worried I'll do it wrong. I like the Stearman tank because it's pretty much idiot-proof. I think that long exposure was around f/45 - wanted to make sure the ship was in sharp focus, plus I got the water nice and smooth. Thanks for watching!
