So this weekend I’m going to try to do something

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So this weekend I’m going to try to do something that isn’t either being at the farm or being here at home glued to my computer. I’ve had an impressive wordcount this autumn (though as it’s all spread through different documents I got no way to track it, which is a shame; I just did a rough tally of the different google docs I’ve been working in that I know are since October and there’s about 75,000 words in there [for the record, the doc with all the daredevil stuff is over 10k! that snippet is just a beginning!]) and that’s great and all, but. 

I have been wanting to do some ambitious silkscreening project since the class I took on silkscreening– anyone remember, way back when, was I even on Tumblr? yes I was, when I fell down the stairs and ended my derby career and was in a boot for eight weeks? That’d be three years ago now I think, actually just about to the week. Anyhow. Those stairs were in the basement of the book arts center. I was at a silkscreening class. Since then I’ve been wanting to make a silkscreened kids’ book, and i have been designing it and the major hangup has been that I don’t know what it should be *about*. 

And I finally came up with a concept a few weeks ago, but I haven’t made any progress beyond that. So I finally got pushed over the edge when my sister told me the niece I spent spring and summer babysitting only needs crayons for Christmas, but maybe I could get her paper and coloring books too. And I thought—- !!! There’s my trial run! A coloring book! Hand-draw the concept art, make some photocopies (hell, scan it, and then print as many copies as I want, I have a never-much-used laser printer in my house), and tweak the art and layout that way. 

Then I can in January get into the book arts center and use their exposure unit to burn my own screens (I have bought screens, like a loser) and actually do the printing at my leisure at home. Since I’ve amassed everything I need except the exposure unit, which is more than I care to attempt to build on my own. (Theirs involves a vaccuum table. It’s real nice. It’s jankety as fuck, but it’s real nice effectively once you coax it along. Even if it is in a terrifying basement with no railings on any of the stairs.)

The only remaining obstacle is that I last was serious about drawing in the late 90s. But I can still do pretty good at objects. And I no longer own any serious drawing equipment but fuck, a Sharpie is what I need anyway. 

So to the anon who was asking about the pictures, here are some...

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So to the anon who was asking about the pictures, here are some of what I could find. My hard drive is still missing but I haven’t torn the place apart looking for it yet, so, *sigh*.

The first one is the photo I had the school bus darkroom guy take of Z and me not last Christmas but the one before. Note how my glasses frames look tinted! They weren’t. My skin looks tan too– it wasn’t! 

The photo was taken outdoors in front of a backdrop, with a huge field camera, on a wet-plate tin negative. Exposure of about thirty seconds, you can see how I moved a little, and my dude clearly blinked repeatedly. The camera had no shutter, the guy just took the lens cap off. 

And then we got to go watch him develop it in his darkroom. It was so cool. 

The other images are Ida Denison, first a shot showing the tintype itself, and second a close-up of the tintype after I spent probably 10 hours Photoshopping the cracks out of it. Who is Ida Denison? Well, a relative of my mother’s, and she could tell you what year or so this has to have been taken– 1870s or 1880s I think, and could locate Ida in our family tree. But this is from a box of daguerreotypes a distant relative found, and gave to my mother to sort and label since my mother is the historian in the extended family. So I thought, for comparison, here is a tintype made back when this would’ve been the height of fashion. My tintype is on a plate of about 3x4 inches; Ida is about thumbprint-sized. 

Back to the school bus darkroom guy, though. Follow that link, and there you will see someone who IS using antique technologies in a meaningful way, which was the basis of my rant. The last entry I saw on his blog involved customizing the tintype method, which is from about the 1870s, to take use of a miniature camera from the 1970s for which film is no longer made. Isn’t that a crazy mix-up of techniques? why would you do that? Well, because art. That’s art! That’s seeing what your really odd techniques will get you, and then doing it on purpose. That’s art.

Slapping a real old lens on your brand-new camera and changing nothing else of your technique? That’s maybe art but it’s a whole shitload less interesting, don’t ask me to care about it. 

I would love to see Anton photograph the Hamilton cast– because almost the first thing everyone did when photography became accessible to nerds was take photos of Rev War veterans– but I bet you anything he’d shoot them not in their costumes. And it would be so much more interesting than the blah “taken with a mid-1800s camera lens and made sepia via Instagram filter” shit I keep seeing reblogged everywhere. 

That was my point. That was my rant. 

But you note, in the end, what are you actually looking at? You’re looking at digital photos of those tintypes. That’s how I was able to share them with you. 

So first of all, the tintype of you is SO COOL, because it really does look exactly like any 100 yea

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Tintypes don’t record light the same way we’re used to film doing. The emulsions were markedly different– up until I think about the 1940s-50s black and white film didn’t respond to red light at all, and just recorded it as black. No, later than that– if you’ve seen the picture set going around of the Addams Family set, in color, it was all shades of pink and black because red would’ve just blended in with the black!

Which partly makes my point. If you take a photo with a modern camera and a “mid-1800s camera lens!!” and then use a modern Instagram or Photoshop filter to convert it to monochrome, it’s going to do so based on a totally different set of criteria than what was used to actually record images in monochrome when that was the state of the art technology. 

And in the case of those photos I was ranting about, sepia-tint– that’s almost entirely what people use as shorthand for “old-fashioned”, but sepia wasn’t particularly popular at any point in history, it’s just that monochrome images on old media that yellows, like paper, are going to look sepia-toned. They’re not. Ambrotypes, cyanotypes– they were all artifacts of using different media to capture monotones. 

And they’re all much different than just going into Photoshop and going image–>mode–>grayscale. 

I’m not saying that modern digital-based photographers don’t work their asses off, both in setting up and capturing actual images, and in post-processing them afterward. The amount of work necessary hasn’t really gone down because the bar has been raised– you used to hand over a wedding album of like 100 prints after a professional job, having exposed probably 150-250 images in total during the actual event, but nowadays it’s routine to give a bride 500-1000 proofs for her to choose which 100 to bind into an album (and those 1000, you’ve winnowed down from the probably 3000 you took). (and yes it’s almost always the bride)

But it’s just different, and while there’s no real harm in artistically evoking the mystique of a bygone era by making an image take on the appearance of having been taken with now-defunct technology, it’s really not at all the same as having used said technology to actually expose an image. 

And this is why, to conclude on a hopeful note, many high schools still teach their smartphone-wielding teenagers black-and-white film photography, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to source the materials and chemistry. Because nothing makes you really understand a medium better than learning the limitations it has expanded beyond.

Steve’s mom got him a camera when he was 13 and

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Steve’s mom got him a camera when he was 13 and recovering from pneumonia. It was a cheap one, used, one of the really basic box cameras, but she knew he liked to draw, and knew many artists used photographs as references. She was, Steve thought rather bitterly, always on the look-out for things he could do without going outside or moving too much.

Of course Bucky instantly knew how to use it. His family had a much fancier camera, one of the kind that folded, and had a nice leather case, and had a lens that could be focused. It also had been purchased new, and that meant it had its instruction manual with it. The instruction manual was important, because it had the chart in it that told you how to make the pictures come out. Steve knew that developing film was expensive, and he didn’t want to waste any.

So Bucky came over after school with the notes he’d collected from Rosemarie Anderson, who was in Steve’s class, and also with his father’s camera, in its original box with the instruction manual.

“Dad almost never uses this,” Bucky confided. “He thought he would, when he bought it, but like Mom said, he shot like one roll of film with it and then put it back in the box and only drags it out when she makes him.”

It was a very nice camera, in a very nice box– black, with orange chevrons, and the interior of the box was a lustrous gold, matching the cover of the manual. The camera and its case were exactly the same shade of brown, and there was all kinds of fancy chrome detailing on the camera’s body. To open it, there was a button you had to press, and the door dropped down to reveal a folding bellows assembly and a lens that slid out onto the door on a track, and settled into place with a really substantial and satisfying click.

Steve’s own camera was much less interesting. Somewhat battered, and it was just a box, a solid box, and there was a lever to make the shutter go, and that was it. But Bucky wasn’t fazed at all. “This kind’s just as good,” he said. “The back opens like this, see?”

He unfastened the catch and opened the rear door. That much, Steve had figured out on his own. “I can’t see where the film goes in, though,” Steve said.

“You gotta pull out the film holder,” Bucky said, and his strong fingers wrapped around something Steve couldn’t make out in all that matte black interior. “And you gotta pull out the film winding knob. Here.” He wound the knob until it protruded, then pulled carefully on the very back of the camera’s interior, and worked out the camera’s insert, which was all matte black and looked like wood or cardstock. “Here, this is where the roll goes in. You take the empty roll out and put it in the takeup position, and then you put the new roll where the empty one was and wind it through.” He demonstrated deftly.

“You taken a lot of pictures?” Steve asked a little gruffly.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “Dad always made me load the camera because he said I had clever little hands.”

“They’re not that little,” Steve said, and Bucky paused, holding his hand out, palm up. Steve fitted his hand against it, and they were pretty close to the same size, but Steve’s hands and feet had always been kind of too big for his small frame. His mother had used to joke that it was because he was like a puppy and he’d grow into them, but he was starting to worry he might not. Most of the boys his age hadn’t hit their growth yet, but he privately doubted that his weak heart would be able to withstand the kind of dramatic growth spurt a lot of the older boys seemed to go through.

Bucky was still pretty small, but he was growing steadily, perfectly average for his age and bigger than Steve by the year. He’d grow into his hands too, but a lot sooner than Steve would.

His skin was warm and dry, and he held his hand against Steve’s longer than he had to just to measure. “I guess,” he said finally, and Steve couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “So what do you want to take pictures of?”

“I can’t go outside yet,” Steve said, glum.

“Me, then,” Bucky said, cheerful. “I’m the only interesting thing in this place.” He pretended to preen, patting at his curls like a girl– but his hair was too short for curls, so it was a meaningless gesture. He fluttered his eyelashes, too.

When it was long enough, his hair did curl, and quite fashionably too. Unlike Steve’s, which just flopped into his eyes. Like it was doing now. He shoved it out of the way a little fiercely. “Interesting is the nicest way to put it,” he said.

“I got character,” Bucky said. He neatly fitted the roll of film into place. “Anyway. It goes in like this, and then you pull the leader over this way and thread it through the take-up reel, like so. Then the whole insert goes back into the box like that.” He shoved the insert back into position and fastened the catch. “Then you gotta wind the take-up reel. You know it worked ‘cuz you can feel the resistance. Got it?”

Steve took the camera from him obediently, and wound the take-up reel in the direction of the arrow. “Okay,” he said. “Your camera doesn’t work the same way, though, does it?”

“Nah,” Bucky said, “but we had one of these when I was little, I used to load it for Dad too. Oh yeah, don’t load it outside, load it where it’s kinda dim.”

“Is it dim in here?” Steve asked, looking around the bedroom. The blinds were mostly drawn. He supposed it was.

Bucky laughed, and went over and opened the blinds. Sunlight streamed in. “That’s perfect now,” he said. “You can take a picture indoors if there’s sunlight. Here, in the book, it lays it out pretty good.”

Steve read through the charts, and Bucky got his father’s camera out and set it up and focused it and then went and posed, and Steve did as he was shown and took a picture. As long as it was a picture of Bucky, then Bucky’s mom probably wouldn’t complain about them wasting film. So he peered through the backwards-and-upside-down little mirrored finder and approximately centered Bucky in the frame, lit from the side, and took the picture when Bucky looked appropriately solemn and dreamy, gazing out the window with his eyelashes somewhat lowered.

“That’ll be a good one,” Bucky said approvingly, having heard the click. “Now you gotta wind the film.”

Steve did, and then he set up his camera, and Bucky posed him in the sunbeam and showed him how the view-finder worked to compose the picture, then took a portrait of him. Steve sat self-consciously, and tried to make the same expression Bucky had, tried to look interesting, tried not to look deathly ill, and Bucky said quietly, “Yeah, Stevie,” and took the picture.

“You think it’ll come out?” Steve asked, squirming a little.

“You looked like an angel,” Bucky said. “Your mom will like it, I think.” He wound the film and put the camera down. “Anyway, that’s enough of that for now, we gotta get through these notes.”

ugh i just sat down and spent half an hour compiling reference images for the illustrations i want..

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ugh i just sat down and spent half an hour compiling reference images for the illustrations i want to do, and absent-mindedly saved them directly to my dropbox, and now just went to open said images and for the first time i’ve ever noticed, dropbox is down.

what the– ugh, and i can’t like, find my download history and find them to re-download to a different folder. it’s like the internet doesn’t want me to actually go and do anything!!! ughhhhh fuck you dropbox. 

I might be drawing a coloring book for niblings (nieces/nephews)...

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I might be drawing a coloring book for niblings (nieces/nephews) for holiday gifts… And the theme might be “hipster bait” because I might be trying to make a screenprint book later. Maybe. I can’t really draw but that hardly matters for this purpose.