Egg Abstractions
mountain city smog, heather noelle
-
- mountain city smog, heather noelle
-
- acid washed jeans, heather noelle
-
- easter, heather noelle
-
- golden egg, heather noelle
-
- mr. egg, heather noelle
-
- egg abortion
These prints (that I am considering for the finals in the egg abstraction project due next Wednesday – I still have to decide) are dark room manipulated fiber based prints. There was a great process involved in getting black and white fiber prints to look like they do here. I started off with a Man Ray influenced solarization where I flicked the main light on in the dark room half way through the development time. I waited until there was a dark black apparent on the print and ran, flicked the lights on and off, and waited another minute or so for it to solarize in the developer. I took the paper through the normal process of fiber paper, waited a day for them to dry, flattened them and then proceeded to chemically enhance them. First I took the prints and selectively submerged them into step one of the sepia toner, the bleach. When I liked the result, I quickly took the print out and put it into a separate tray of water. After a few minutes I used a “Bright Blue” toner with a soft paint brush to selectively tone certain parts of the image I wanted to stand out the most. The combination of the blacks and grays from the original print still remaining from the bleaching process meshed well with the blue toner, in my opinion. After I washed the blue toner off, I dipped parts of the prints in the sepia toner to give a smokey “rotten egg” feel to some. What i did not anticipate was the blue toner reacting with the sepia toner creating hues of green and even pink in some places which, to me, was a very happy mistake.
I also did some digital variations of the 35mm shots I took. I think I like them a lot more than the prints that I did. The colors are so vibrant and the images are so crisp; as much as I love analog, I think digital is where we’re all headed…and it’s CLEAR why. But, for the record, I am and will always be in love with the dark room. I think I’m straying a whole lot from the intent of this project; to compare and contrast dark room printing to ink jet printing to see how well technology can mimic the arduous dark room processes involved in making a fiber based print. I think it’s important to understand how they coincide, but in addition, I believe that they are very different and made for different techniques. I think that digital imagining is what ink jet printers are designed for and film is made for dark room printing. I understand that it’s interesting to know how to scan negatives to print from ink jet; but why would you do this when a high quality digital image is going to look much better? If you developed your own negatives, scan them in to see which ones you like and then print in the dark room. Maybe this paragraph is merely all my biases coming together but I do think the results would be at their best if digital images were printed rather than scanned negatives.
egg balloons, heather noelle
whites, heather noelle
