Dalton Rooney

Archaeology, Siracusa - 5x5 Palladium Print

I had a productive weekend in the darkroom. Now that I’ve had a chance to do a whole bunch of prints, I am going to go back and do some fine tuning. I’m also excited to try some larger prints. I’ve been printing at 5×5 so far, which looks great, but I am very curious to see what some of these images would look like at 8×8 and larger.

I’ve also been going through my contact sheets from Sicily and found a few interesting photographs that I didn’t notice on my first pass through. I think I now have about 30 photographs in the Sicily series altogether. Isn’t it nice when that happens?

Side street, Siracusa - 5x5 Palladium Print

Cactus, Cefalù - 5x5 Palladium Print

I can’t spend enough time in the darkroom right now. I am printing at a feverish pace.

La Rocca, Cefalù - 5x5 Palladium Print

Via Cara Phillips, I found this great slideshow of images from Damon Winter following Barack Obama on the campaign trail.

Bond Street Gallery has a blog.

Photograph by Victoria Sambunaris

There is some wonderful landscape photography on the Women in Photography blog this week. Victoria Sambunaris travels prodigiously and makes expansive photographs of natural landscapes permeated with industrial artifacts. It’s a subject that’s been handled before, but not often done this well. One thing that immediately comes across is Ms. Sambunaris’ excellent use of color. The palette of these photographs is very subtle and controlled, and yet feels very natural at the same time.

There is a bit more to see on the Yancey Richardson Gallery website, but I am left wanting more. I hope she is showing her work in New York City again soon.

I recently discovered tinytinygroupshow, an online exhibition of photographs curated by Kevin J. Miyazaki. The latest tinytinygroupshow, “Simultaneous”, is a series of photographs that were all taken at exactly 12:00 central time on August 17th.

I love the absolute lack of pretension in Kevin’s presentation. Here is the theme. Here are the photographs. Enjoy them.

I am only sorry that tinytinygroupshow is limited to viewing on the web. This goes for Humble’s group show, too, as well as some of the very fine web-based photo magazines that have been appearing lately. The more time I spend in the darkroom, the more time I spend looking at books and going to galleries and museums, the more I have come to appreciate the photograph as a physical object. I realize that 99% of the pictures made today never actually make it to paper, but for me the ultimate experience of a photograph is still in relating to the object, and not just the image on a screen.

The economic freedom of distribution via the Internet has allowed projects like this to flourish, but I’m glad that Remain in Light and Pause, to Begin are coming around to keep my infatuation with the printed image alive. Kevin, if you ever were to publish a compiled booklet of all of the tinytinygroupshows, I would gladly buy one.

Lo Zingaro - 5x5 Palladium Print

Lo Zingaro is a natural reserve near Scopello on the eastern coast of Sicily. It is rugged and beautiful, but most people are there for the beach rather than for the hiking. The beach is difficult to get to, nestled in a cove and completely sheltered from the outside world.

This is my first finished palladium print. It measures 5×5 inches and looks much, much nicer in real life than it does on the screen. I still need to make a few small adjustments to this image, but overall the process seems to be working quite well. More to come!

Édouard Baldus, Le Moine, ca. 1861, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

An August weekend in New York is usually just an excuse to get out of town, but if you are stuck in the city (or are visiting) there are a few photography shows closing soon that you should probably know about.

You have one week left to catch the Bechers at MoMA, two weeks to see the phenomenal “Framing a Century” exhibition at the Met, and only a few weeks for Mapplethorpe’s “Polaroids” at the Whitney, and “When Color Was New” at the Julie Saul Gallery, which includes vintage color photographs from Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Walker Evans, Luigi Ghirri, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld (just to name a few).

If you are near Washington D.C., it would be a crime to miss the Richard Misrach show at the National Gallery. It closes on September 1.

Summer goes by so quickly. Soon it will be time for corduroy again and we’ll have a new crop of exhibitions to choose from. I just discovered Abelardo Morell on Aline Smithson’s blog and will definitely be visiting his show at the Bonni Benrubi gallery in September.

Are there any exhibitions, current or in the near future, New York City or elsewhere, that you would recommend or are looking forward to seeing?

I have been holed up in my basement for the last two weeks, coming up for air only occasionally. I’m pretty sure my wife has forgotten what I look like by now. I’ve been hard at work developing my process for palladium printing with digital negatives. It has been hit-or-miss so far: these test charts represent only about half of the total work I’ve done in the darkroom. Some of the charts are getting close, but I’m still not really happy with any of them.

I am printing my digital negatives on Pictorico OHP using the QuadTone Rip software I discussed in my post on inkjet printing. Ron Reeder has written a good how-to guide on using QTR to control the ink deposition and contrast settings for digital negatives. The problem is that QTR isn’t very well documented and testing is very much a trial and error process. As I get closer to correcting one variable, all of the others seem to move around. Like herding cats, as they say.

In a fit of desperation, I went ahead and bought Mark Nelson’s Precision Digital Negatives e-book. It was not cheap, but I have read some of Nelson’s articles in various books and magazines and have gotten recommendations from other alt-process printers. PDN seems like a more systematic approach to calibrating the digital negative process. I have learned a lot in my first few weeks of printing, so even though I am starting out with a new calibration system, at least I am not starting from scratch. I think I will be producing my first palladium prints by September.

Oh, and I broke my first Puddle Pusher last night. Doug warned me that would probably happen, I should have ordered more than one!