"Two Friends" ~ Gum over Palladium Print

The newest print is now complete. I didn't photograph each layer on this print simply because of expediency, mostly, as well as simple energy levels. Outside the print room the energy is being used up moving twelve tons of river rock, spreading it over a rather large area, by wheelbarrow. So the viewer gets to see the final version. As I've mentioned more than once, each new print brings new insights, along with a deeper intuitive control of the printing, or "body knowing" level of understanding.

What I am working towards in my gum over printing is to keep the image color applications natural looking. Not a lot different than equating it to women's makeup. The makeup, when applied, should add a visually pleasing affect, without being seen. If you can actually see the makeup on the face, it's too much, like clown makeup. Thirteen year old girls trying out makeup for the first time learn this rule over the course of a few years of applying it. Same with gum printers. Just enough gum color applied to leave no trace of its application, just the subtle affect to the image, where applied.

I've divided this print image into two primary areas; background of cooler tones the and foreground of warmer tones, very close to the natural setting when the image was shot. Mid afternoon sunshine, with shaded foliage in the background. The foliage happened to be evergreens, which are a blue/green, not deep green. To be able to do this with some degree of control, I've had to step away from the traditional color spectrum of the pure CYMK printing order. That does work, and would have worked here, had I chosen that avenue. The drawback of that method is the reduced potential outcomes staying within those four colors. The print image will roughly show a 'color' image, yet much of it will be a more neutral (grayish) tone overall, with much less tonal separation of color, however subtle they may be. I would not have arrived at the cool to warm image I wanted staying with the CYMK colors, which I had always done in the past.

The colors applied to this print image were Pthalo Blue (background foliage) & Yellow Ochre (foreground) *printed to the tonal range of the silver dress & white cat fur, just so the floating began to affect both. Second layer of gum color, was a second split color run; Cadmium Yellow (background foliage) & Van Dyke Brown, very sheer (foreground) printed just below the dress' density range. With the mixtures apparently at the right levels to arrive at the subtle colors in the end, I'm quite pleased with this print. Usually every print has one little detail the printer would like to alter, just a bit, to make the better image. Not this one. It is everything I had intended, and hoped for.

Gum over Palladium Print
"Two Friends" ~ 8x10 ~ Unique
Eugene, Oregon

Gum over Palladium Final Print ~ "The Fiddlers"

The finished gum over palladium print of "The Fiddlers" is finished. I was able to make that happen with four print layers, using seven colors. What I was after was leaving the effect of late afternoon sunshine. Decisions had to be made as just exactly how that was to be done, and how much. My intent is having the applied colors to look natural, not hand painted in like a hand colored image, although there is a bit of that to allow for separations of the tones and independent colors. I left the grasses at zone 7, mostly, with a couple spots sliding into zone 8. The actual grass was browned from summer heat.

Overall, I accomplished what I had set out to do. There are applied colors I am unable to actually see, like the green in the darker foliage in the background. Or the light green applied to the boy's shirt. Technically, the boys's pants should be tan(ish) with a hint of 'golden glow' over that. For  more definitive observations pertaining to color I refer to my color guru for confirmation or advice, whom sees the fuller color spectrum, being a watercolor artist.


Gum over Palladium ~ Seven print layers
"The Fiddlers" ~ 8x10 ~ Unique
Eugene, Oregon ~ 1984

Gum Over Palladium ~ Layer 2 ~ "The fiddlers"

One of the givens of gum over printing is simply that once another layer has been applied the printer no longer really has a means of visually 'seeing' that past layer, only the updated version. That is why I have been taking the time and pains to copy each layer as they are printed, and hopefully faithfully replicating the image to post. *Repeat ~ I am pretty much color blind to red/green. I have learned to discern the difference between the two in a print primarily by 'warm tone' 'cool tone' reference. I print gum colors using subtractive color theory. Theoretically.

That doesn't always return what I was after, theoretically. Every new print teaches me something about the process, and the intuitive senses begin to take over; "hand". That is the visually recognizable work of any photographer or artist, or even musician. It only takes three notes for me to recognize a Pink Floyd piece, or Carlos Santana on guitar. The "hand" of a fine printer working with a good silver gelatin paper is going to be less noticeable than the hand of a hand coated process, and even more so when working with very unique processes like gum. A fine printer of silver gel images would be all but indistinguishable from Ansel Adams' printing. Using the same commercial papers and printing a full scaled print is not all that separate. Gum printing is like oil painting. There is no 'right way' to do it. Only styles and techniques, and that leads us back to "hand".

Looking back over the past ten or so gum prints I have made over the past year, I can see a progression to the printing. A more subtle way of applying the gum, in better combinations, more aligned to the needs of the image than to conventional notions of mixing and applying gum colors. I have always used the CYMK coloring theme, even though I use the one b&w negative. I learned two things. First, the negatives I would use to make a palladium print, far exceeds the density range needed for a gum over print. And secondly, there is no order nor prearranged color arrangement expected. There is only 'affect' upon the scene, focused around the light of the scene. That is, the color(s) chosen for the scene can be any desired, and, mixed together to make even more colors and tones. Makes a printer think in painterly terms of color, not in terms of application, but in color theory and the color wheel, then flip that into subtractive color theory.

This Print layer was split into two parts; Ultramarine Blue (very sheer) and Pthalo Blue (mixed sheer) and applied to two areas. The Ultramarine Blue went to the foliage in the background and top of the rose bush behind the seated boy, down to the beginning of the lighter grass area. That lighter grass area got a very sheer mixture of Pthalo Blue, with just a touch more dichromate for sensitivity, and thinness. The background foliage prints down first, thus permanent by the time the grass area has begun printing down. I printed to 12 min this layer. The palladium print was 10 minutes, the first Ochre coat was 15 minutes, to print to the zone 7 area, give it some detail color.

Compared to the last print layer of Yellow Ochre, the print doesn't have that overall Yellow look, and I can detect that the rose bush isn't yellow any longer, which indicates that the blue over layer shifted it to a green(ish) color, different from the grasses. What has to be imagined is the elimination of the yellow dichromate stain. Try doing that when you don't actually see the colors. Theoretically, what I will end up with is a subtle green(ish) background and partially in the grasses, with a late afternoon sunlight on the players. There will be a very sheer layer of Raw Umber printed over parts of the players' clothes (hat, bows) and violins, to shift away from yellowish to closer to their attire. A final layer of quinacridone gold will be the 'golden glow' of the late afternoon sunshine.

Gum over Palladium ~ Layer 2 ~ Ultramarine Blue/Pthalo Blue
"The Fiddlers"

First Gum Layer over Palladium ~ "The Fiddlers"

A good deal  of thought went into how I intended on structuring the gum layers on this image. There are so many potential treatments. What I want out of this image is replicating the warm sunny day I shot these images, late afternoon sun with that warm glow on subjects. My choice for first coat is the color of warm sunshine; Yellow Ochre. Wielding colors on a printed palladium image can get so much wilder than one can get away with layering a gum only print. The Yellow Ochre mixture was thick, to the point the gum becomes almost opaque to light from the backside, looking through the mix swirled up on the side of a clear plastic vessel.

The 'yellow' effect of the image, especially after a layer of Yellow Ochre, will fade to approximately half of what is seen at this point, the other half and more obvious part of the yellow, is the dichromate stain, which is of course yellow. The print is cleared in a 5% solution of sodium bisulfite when the print is finished. Not much can be noted at this time with exception to the warming effect the color layer sets up. Next up will be a sheer layer of Ultramarine Blue, which itself is the sheerest form of blue watercolors. That will be applied mostly to the background foliage and perhaps even sheerer in a few areas of the grasses. That will shift the yellow(ish) color to green(ish), all depending on how sheer and where applied, also time floated. Those being the control variables of gum printing.

Layer #1 ~ Yellow Ochre
"The Fiddlers"

Beginning New Gum over Palladium Print

Changing over my negative printing system was not done lightly, nor all that easily. Changing to a laser printer instead of an inkjet printer changes the printable part of the density range through  the print  time. Having acquired a simple densitometer from an old photography friend helps immensely with standardizing the densities to a visual degree. What once would have been a bit flat for my tastes in a palladium print is now to become the standard. There are a couple of reasons for this actually.

Experience has demonstrated that the layers of gum color printed over the palladium print show up almost exclusively in the middle tones from about zone 3 through zone 6 (max). The tonal ranges below zone 3 are black, for the most part, and the added gum layers deepen that black, bolster it, make it almost appear the black is gaining depth. The highlights, for me, have to  do with zone 7, and sometimes, just a touch of zone 8 in small amounts, as reflective highlights, like bright light on a drop of water. The gum color gets floated off. The only way to adhere the color to a zone 7 tone is to print just beyond zone seven, perhaps a minute or two more print time, then do a very slow float.

When I say slow float, that refers to water temperature, one of the variables at the printer's disposal. Float water controls the speed at which gum is softened and 'floated away', beginning with the highest tonal range of the image, zone 8, then zone 7, then zone 6. With a controlled float, which in my mind is optimally around two minutes, the printer has the ability to slowly float away each layer, slow enough to be able to see the progress over the course of those two minutes. That is not a sacrosanct number. Float time could be four or five minutes for cautious floating. Adding print time to the image acts the same as it would in a conventional print on commercial silver gelatin paper, with exception that the silver gel print will darken as print time is added. The gum print 'hardens' in those areas most affected by the UV light during printing. The print 'hardens' proportionately to the density range of the negative, with most hardening at the lower densities/tonal ranges first, then each density above that hardens next, the same order as negatives develop densities in the developer.

For the best relationship with the gum layers I have rejiggered the negatives to a density range of roughly .8-.9. A snappy print image on a grade 2 commercial silver gelatin paper, as opposed to a log 1.4 I was using for palladium printing alone. This certainly softened the tonal scale and kept the upper tonal ranges, well within zone 7 as I have been working towards. I want the high key light of the direct sunshine to be evident, while holding in the textural detail of the violins which both had reflections (reflective light), hence become part of the highlights. I will be able to print to that light (tonal range) and will do so at the end, using a color layer to represent the 'golden glow' of late afternoon sunlight, as it was here. To make this print work right will demand several color layers, some applied locally for enhancement of that area or texture.

Gum over Palladium Print ~ Base palladium image
"The Fiddlers" ~ 8x10 ~ *Will be Unique
Eugene, Oregon (Russian Emigrants)  Dimitri & Son

Final Gum over Palladium print

Working with gum over palladium prints is quite a bit different than making gum prints. The subtleties of gum printing get lost when applied over a printed palladium print. You can get away with a lot. The  color mixtures are so much denser when layering over a finished image, as each color layer doesn't show up as it would if applied as another color layer over other sheer color layers.

The final image includes three gum print layers, using six color mixes. I am not after bright colors here, like a color photograph. What I want to accomplish is subtle colors and increased textural depth in the image. For me to be able to keep things right at the breaking edge of loud color and very subtle color flavoring, necessitates keeping what I can see of the color just showing up. If I can clearly see the color red in a print, it's really red. What can be noticed right off, for those having seen the image in the last post, is the yellowish prevailing color, which is the dichromate stain. The print was cleared for this image. What should remain is a subtle green in the foliage and warm toned rocks beneath the girl, with her dress just breaking at zone 7, showing a bit of color from the sunlight. And of course, the flower she is holding should be red(ish), although I am unable to actually see what that looks like.

So, my interpretation of a "Girl with Flower"

Gum  over Palladium
"Girl with Flower" ~ 8x10 ~ Unique
Eugene, Oregon ~ 1984

New Gum Over Palladium Print

The past month has not been technologically kind to me. For me to create negatives at home is no longer cost effective. Printers that are capable of inking a sheet of acetate film; i.e., Pictorico OHP Acetate Film, sufficiently to make a palladium print, cost well over $500 (manufacture's price) and are now costing almost several more times that in the market. An Epson 3880 printer lists on Amazon today for $2450. What is unknown at this time is if an Epson 1430 is capable of making a good negative. Epson reps don't know the answer to that question. If you can find that printer, it is likely a used or perhaps refurbished model, and sells for over $300; $900+ new.

I have found a commercial printer who grasped the conditioned I rattled off to her, and a test negative using one of the adjustment <curve> I made for my printer. Turns out her laser printer needs less curve to do the same job, at 600dpi. That marriage has yet to be celebrated, because as soon as I was informed that the format needed for this printing demanded a pdf file, not tiff. Not to worry, I have Lightroom 4, and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, right? All of a sudden now, Lightroom simply refuses to produce a pdf file like it always has. Now, see, it's here that demons or evil spirits have invaded my workspace. For $150 I just bought Lightroom 6, which should easily take care of the pdf problem, as well as offer up some updated tools and abilities from the older version that grandpa used, probably when DOS was around, and people knew what that meant.

So I have had to shift focus for a few days until my software CD arrives and I can once again begin having negatives printed. Perhaps due to having decent karma I have two negatives I had printed earlier, before the print head streaking took hold. They will keep the printing moving in the interim. This particular image "Girl with Flower" will be given to an old friend whom I showed basic black and white photography and developing/printing techniques, and took that and ran with it. His work was excellent. Over the years he collected a number of twins lens cameras, having sent me two Rolleicord 1A twin lens cameras, to chose one I liked, send the other back. Three rolls of film later I know which will go home now.

This print is a palladium toned Kallitype, developed in sodium citrate, toned in palladium rich toner formula, one I use being it mimics a platinum/palladium print color, a bit cooler, more neutral tone than the weaker toner solution using 1ml or 2ml per liter of palladium. I use 5ml/liter. I didn't post the palladium image after printing as I've posted numerous palladium toned Kallitypes using the same formula. This image has the first gum color layer added. What I'm working on with this layer was finding the print point for zone 7, which in this case is the girl's dress, which is hovering between zone 7, where I want it, and zone 8 as it is right now. There will be several more layers printed in before this image is finished. Then it will be sent to my friend Ed.

Two things to notice in this image. First, it's square, which will be a theme upcoming for my street shooting images, from the Rolli.  And secondly, the slightly out of focus of this shot, as I saw this young lady as she is coming around to the front of my house. She was the daughter of Ed's girlfriend at the time; 1984(ish). I happened to be carrying a very early Argoflex twin lens camera I bought for $18 and was trying it out. I hurried over to where she was trying not to "charge her" and freak her out, so casually I walked over and looked down, did a quick focus as I closed in, and pushed down on the shutter release. I'm slightly focused behind here, but I don't believe it distracts from the moment, when the print is done. The task now, besides adding color depth to the image, is printing down the girl's dress to a textural range.

Palladium toned Kallitype
"Girl with Flower" ~ 8x10 ~ Unique
Eugene, Oregon