I had visited the Westview cemetery in Atlanta a few years ago with other LF photographers from North Georgia. At that time I saw this huge red oak tree and tried to capture it on 4×5 film but even my wide angle lens did not do it justice. When I purchased my 5×12 camera in […]

It has been a long while since I posted and I have been house bound due to the Chinese Covid-19 so have not been out shooting or even experimenting much in the darkroom. I have not even had a chance to take out my new 5×12 camera due to weather and other priorities. We are […]

I had tried this experiment previously with Pyrocat HD and wanted to see its effect with Pyrocat M. I had seen a post about an olive toner using cachetol in a bleach + redevelop process. The toner is known as IT8. I decided to use dilute Pyrocat M in place of the cachetol toner to […]

Initially I Iiked the cold tones of the original print, but I was doing some toning and thought why not try it with this one. It has strong blacks that I wanted to preserve as dark tones so my experiment was to determine if Selenium + Thiourea would give me the desired effect. After a […]

Here is the final print version of Amicalola Creek. My initial version was a scan of the negative and processed in Photoshop to my normal brown tone. However after printing this image I thought I liked it better more neutral grey. But I did decide to warm it up a bit so did a little […]

The Desoto Falls campground and trail has become one of my favorite spots lately. Frogtown creek at the campground level is a rock filled creek with plenty of composition opportunities. The 3/4 mile hike to Upper Desoto Falls is relatively easy and has a good viewing platform. The sound of the rushing water is very […]

After my toning experiments I decided to split tone the Frogtown Creek II image. I think I went a little too far with bleaching so turned the whole image brownish rather than just warming the faintest highlights. But I do like the results and it is different than the untoned version. The print was a […]

Today I decided to run some more toning tests. Instead of working with a scenic image I chose to make a sort of step wedge though not very precise.  I exposed an 8×10 sheet 1 second at a time moving a cardboard sheet down the page until I hit about 12 seconds which was more […]

Over the last few weeks I have been trying my hand at Toning with Thiourea (Sepia) and Selenium on different papers. This thanksgiving day weekend gave me some extra time to try Split Toning with both. And as luck would have it my mentor Steve Sherman put out a video on his toning technique along […]

Continuing experimentation with toning or in this case staining I decided to see what soaking an image in espresso would do. While I let one of my test prints pre-soak in about 75* water for 5 minutes, I ran a double shot portafilter full of freshly ground espresso through 4 cycles which gave me about […]