Bob Keefer
Is a writer and photographer who lives in rural Oregon. This is an informal blog with no particular purpose other than to give myself something to do with some of the welter of photographs I take each day.
For more considered work, see my hand-colored photography at BobKeeferPhoto.com.
You can email me at bob/at/bkpix.com.
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Tag Archives: landscape
Ferns
Walking around in the woods this evening.
photo: Ferns, digital black and white, 2010
Hand coloring problem solved, I think
I’m figuring out, at last, how to use digital black and white carbon prints for hand coloring.
Turns out the carbon pigment is well bound to the paper — mostly. So what you need to do is remove the loose particles.
About 30 seconds under cool running water and an all-over scouring with a paintbrush seems to do the trick without noticeably affecting the quality of the print. Most of the ink is tightly attached to the watercolor paper. You can see a trickle of loose ink flow off the page, though.
I then dry the print and give it a spray of workable fixative before painting. That’s a step I would like to skip, if I can perfect the scrubbing; I hate the smell of fixative.
But the scrubbing works.
Painting on the watercolor paper is very different from painting on the smooth, non-absorbent surface of a traditional silver-gelatin print. It will take me a while to get used to the new process.
photo: Twilight in the garden, digital black and white, 2010
And even more twilight BW
I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what is going on here — obviously it’s some kind of digital artifact — but I do love the look. This is taken at ISO 3200 in the garden at twilight, shot into the sky.
And good news on the printing front: MIS sent a new ink system, having concluded that the directions I was given with the last one were incorrect, thus explaining the pale, washed out prints I was getting. Putting the right ink in the right slot, oddly enough, nailed it. The new prints, at least so far, are dead on and gorgeous (and even match what I see on the computer monitor). And a side benefit: No profiles to deal with.
photo: Grape leaves by twilight, digital black and white, 2010
And here’s another one
photo: Grape leaves at twilight, digital black and white, 2010
Beautiful flash blur in the orchard
I love this effect. And the neat thing about digital is that you get instant feedback on whether or not you’ve done it right.
On the other hand, I still haven’t figured out how to print digital BW so that the prints can be hand colored…. a longer topic for another post.
photo: Pear tree and moon, digital black and white, 2010