Moved

My blog has moved to a new home, visit it at http://dputmanphotography.com/blog

Ambrotype experiments

A few friends and I recently started a new project, making ambrotypes! For those who don’t know, an ambrotype is a positive image shot directly onto a glass plate. This is accomplished using the wet plate collodion process, where you take a piece of cut glass, pour a thin layer of a collodion solution onto the plate, then sensitize the plate in a silver nitrate solution. This makes the plate light sensitive, but the kicker is you have to shoot an image and begin developing the plate while it is still wet! This process, although very time consuming and difficult, produces absolutely beautiful images. There is a huge learning curve to the process, but every week the plates look a bit better! Here is a little taste of the images I have made so far, there will be more soon!

Self Portrait

Go Fast, Turn Left!

I went to a off road race a couple weeks ago sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Four Wheel Drive Association; haven’t been to one in a long time but it was still loads of fun! I used to go to these almost every other weekend with my dad when we had our race truck, but he had some shoulder issues which prevented him from racing, and I just didn’t have the time to keep racing while in school, so we wound up selling it.

Took a few images throughout the weekend, but really didn’t have much time to shoot as we were running the barrel course. For everyone who doesn’t know how barrel racing works, I’ll give a quick explanation. It is very similar to barrel racing on horses; there are 3 barrels set up in a triangle, and the racer starts in a gate lined up with the center barrel:

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Starting Gate

The object is to make a full circle around each barrel and make it back into the gate as fast as possible, hence the title “Go fast, turn left!”

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the race, enjoy! 🙂

Infrared Test

Went over to Moses Lake a few weeks ago (Eastern Washington) to play with some infrared film (Rollei IR400) in the sand dunes. I want to to a “real” shoot with this film in the near future in the sand dunes, but had to play with it a little first to see how it would react, and I am glad I did because the effect was not what I had in mind! Still have some more experiments to do before I can do a shoot with this film, but I got some advice on how to shoot it from my friend Dave Harms, so now I am going to try shooting it at ISO 25 instead of the rated speed of ISO 400. Here are a few examples that my good friends Sarah and Yukari  were nice enough to model for! 😉

Hassy Test

A local photographer who I recently assisted was VERY generous and let me take his Hasselblad 500c kit out for a week to play around with some of his different lenses. Here are some of the results, a few of these have already seen the darkroom but I need to spend some time in there and make some nice prints… but for now the scans will do. Hopefully I will be able to save up some money and buy a couple of the lenses from him soon! 🙂

Polaroid to Glass Plate

After playing around with some polaroid transfers (which I still haven’t scanned) I thought about what would happen if you stuck a negative into the daylab instead of a slide. Obviously the image that came out was a negative, but heres the cool part. I took the negative polaroid, and did a normal emulsion lift but instead of transferring the image onto paper like you would usually do, I stuck it on a 5×7 piece of cut glass! So now I basically have a glass plate with my polaroid emulsion on it, and the next step will be to take it into the darkroom and put it in an enlarger to see what kind of prints I can get. But for now, here’s the plates I made today 🙂

Real Estate

I started shooting real estate listings for some local agents recently, and even though it may not be the MOST exciting work, it does have its perks, like getting to see beautiful areas like the one I shot yesterday! 🙂

Daylab Creations round 1

Just got a daylab slide printer the other day from my wonderful friend Jennifer, here’s the first round of images! Still trying to get the hang of the color controls on it, but so far I’m thrilled with the results. Some of these are cross processed Kodak Gold 200 (color neg. film) and some are older and new slide film.  Enjoy!!

Blue

Did a new beauty shoot a little while ago, these are my 2 favorites from the shoot. 🙂

 

Makeup- Michelle Pellecer

Model- Tawnie Baker

Hair- Jennifer Castillo

Assistant- Yukari Isa

Quilcene, WA

Took another short road trip yesterday over to the other side of the water, sooo nice to get away from the city for awhile! Here’s a sample, one of the few digital shots I took (most of the rest are polaroids.) Hopefully I’ll get to scan them tomorrow… Enjoy!