"The Bugler's Mascot"

 The sixth print in the Civil War portfolio. This one, as the others, was extremely contrasty, from the original film negatives. I am able to mitigate a good deal of that contrast using the four basic density slides of Lightroom. The period images as they are, would lend themselves to some very contrasty images during the day, being during the civil war, only salted paper and carbon printing [gum dichromate today] were in use at the time, with the exception of wet plate photography. Timothy O'Sullivan's wet plate photographs of civil war images. Generals, troops formations, bivouac setups and after the battle scenes. Wet Plate inherently leaves a very contrasty image, with the blacks deep, sometimes little middle tones and high contrast to blown out whites and skies.

But then, I'm not competing with Timmy O'Sullivan here. These images are warmer toned than era photographs which were very black and white, not much in the middle. Palladium didn't arrive until mid 1870's, Kallitype in the 1890's. Think of what you do today for an image, and wet plate photography, when you had minutes to get the photo on the wet plate you just snapped had to get into a solution, in a wagon in the middle of a vast prairie. But I digress.

I'm keeping to the continuity of mostly warmer toned images, developed in sodium citrate, printed on Hahnemuhle Platinum rag, using a custom built UV printer [8 - 24" 20W white blacklight bulbs] with a print time of 10 minutes. Most of these prints are ten minutes prints, whereas, normally printing time is eight minutes. The task for this print was controlling the whites [zone 7] A good amount of the focus of the image are the whites. The task was keeping them at zone 7, The bit of zone 8 in the print is of the mascot's right sleeve, the hottest area of the print image. That, without darkening the background to obscurity. Comments are always welcome of course.

Palladium toned Kallitype

"The Bugler's Mascot"

Salem, Oregon 1990