The Diversity in My New Book

In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil (expected to be published sometime in 2024)

You’re going to start seeing some "comps" posted here every once in a while. These are ideas that I have for my book. As I look through the images, some of the pairings absolutely astound me; they are more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing than I could have imagined.

I’m still undecided about how the final layout will look, but I wanted to play with mixing them up—POP with RA-4 color—living with them and running some ideas through my head. I think it looks stunning. I’ve never seen POP prints paired with Color Reversal Direct prints. Gorgeous! 

Right now, it’s a 10” x 10” (25,4 x 25,4 cm) hardcover, full-color book. I expect it to be about 250 pages with over 100 images: RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Prints, Palladiotypes, Platinum-Palladium, Kallitypes (both K1 and K2 variants), Cyanotypes, Calotypes (Paper Negatives), Photogenic Drawings, and much more. The POP prints are from both wet and dry collodion as well as direct contact printing from plant material (photogenic drawings), like Salt prints.

“What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation.”

— Ernest Becker

“The Great Mullein” Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative and a 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print

“Antlers Are Bone: Profile,” 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print, and “Mountain Stone Water Dish,” Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative.

“Three Aspens” Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative and “Ponderosa Pine and Five White Daisies” 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print

“Antlers Are Bone” Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative and a 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print

“Dead Ponderosa and Granite Rock Face” Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative and “Dead Daisies in a Glass Graduate," 10” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print

“Red Rock Formation-Fremont County, Colorado,” a 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print and “The Great Aspen Man” Whole Plate Palladiotype from a Calotype (paper negative) Greenlaw’s process.

“Turkey Feathers and Antlers,” a 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print and “Medicine Wheel," a Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative.

“The Great Mullein,” a 10”” x 10” RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print and “Meadow Barley",” Whole Plate Photogenic Drawing from the plant itself (direct contact print).

A stack of prints—almost 200 prints—color, pop, calotypes (paper negatives), photogenic drawings, etc. And I still have about 3 months of image making left this year!

Checking Density (Dmax/Dmin) On Wet Collodion Negatives

The Wet Collodion Negative - varnished and ready to run some test prints on Platinum Palladium and Rawlins Oil!

The Equation
Dmax: The area with the most density with detail.
Dmin: The area with the least amount of density with detail.
Subtract the Dmin from the Dmax and that is your NEGATIVE DENSITY.

The Print
If you want to maximize the quality of a print, you need to know what the Dmax/Dmin, or density of your negative is - maximum density (with detail), where the most silver is deposited. This is the brightest or highlight area(s). The thinnest part with detail is your Dmin area - approaching the void area or shadow(s). And everything else in between is the middle tones or middle values.

Why is it important? Not every negative will print well on every POP (Printing Out Process) or DOP (Developing Out Process). Some require density in the 2.0+ range - like Salt Paper. And some require less density. If you fail to match the negative with the process, it will never be as good of a print as possible if it were matched up.

In my opinion, you should choose a printing process and make negatives exclusively for that process. I’m not saying you can’t print a “Salt Negative” on Colodio-Chloride paper, you can. What I’m saying is that it will never be as good as a Salt print and vice versus.

My plans for this project are two types of prints. Both are “non-silver” and one is a pigment process. They are Platinum Palladium (mostly Palladium) and Rawlins Oil prints. I’ve made many Rawlins Oil prints and know that good negatives are almost identical to the Platinum Palladium process. The density of 1.50 - 1.80 is perfect. I can get great prints all the way to 2.0.

What happens if you don’t get the proper exposure or development on the negative? What can you do? Rarely are you too dense; I’m not talking about over-exposure, but getting in the density of 2.0+ with a foundation negative, or a negative straight out the camera. Most of the time they will be a bit under the desired density for technical reasons (fogging the shadow areas). If you need more density, you can do that chemically with pyrogallic acid and citric acid plus a bit of silver nitrate. This is called redevelopment and you can take it as far as you desire regarding density. Problem solved.

The Negative
Today, I varnished and prepared my test plate for my first run of the Platinum Palladium process and Rawlins Oil process. I checked the Dmax and found that where the light was hitting the back of the stump, my highlights, with details, ranging from 1.75 to 1.80. And the areas with the thinnest silver (some weeds in the foreground) that still had detail registered as 0.20 - that means if I subtract the Dmin from the Dmax I have a density of 1.59 - or thereabout. This should be a perfect negative for the processes. I’ll soon find out!