“Hannya” – 2.5 inch wet plate collodion tintype

“The Mask Series” from Linked Ring Photography on Vimeo.

This is behind the scenes footage of Dan Kennedy and Nicole Truax’s contribution to “The Mask Series”; a worldwide collaboration of over 100 wet plate artists who are given the same prop, a Czech M10 Gas Mask, and choose to photograph the piece in their own unique way.

http://wetplatemaskseries.com/

Filmed by Joshua Kelley
Edited by Linked Ring Photography
Music: “Jesse” by The Morning on Fire

Blog post written about the video/shoot from Melanie Garrett

Locust – 2.5 inch tintype mounted on Cocobolo.[/caption]

Plague Doctor – 2.5 inch tintype mounted on a slab of 147 year old wood that was reclaimed from a demolished house originally constructed during the last year of the Civil War. There are pieces of the original nails still embedded.

Two 2.5 inch tintype multiple exposures of Nicole Truax mounted on 5×5 slabs of Padauk wood.

These are mounted on 6×6 slabs of Padauk Wood.

The following 3 images show the process. We are shooting with a Twin Lens Reflex Yashica-D with a fixed 50mm lens. The way we create distorted macro images with a soft focus is by shooting through a 8x magnifying loupe. We can shoot in either direction, depending upon what we want the outcome to be.

The next 3 images show the tintypes along side their models:

The remaining images portray are further attempts at abstractions using grasshoppers, dragonflies, butterflies, etc as models:

Execution Project: The journey Begins from Linked Ring Photography on Vimeo.

Video from our trip out west and our most recent Execution Project photoshoots.

Yashica_D and 2.5×2.5 black aluminum:

Dan with portable darkroom backpack:

Nicole in the ground glass:

First location field darkroom set up:

Subbing station:

Everything neatly packed up:

Nicole in the ground glass:

Second location darkroom set up:

Nicole and the darkroom:

Yashica-D:

All of the above images were documented with an IPhone.

Below are the 3 2.5×2.5 Tintypes we came away with:

Siren:

Daphnaeae:

Huck:

All in all it was a fun side project, and we’re going to pursue a few other projects using this format.

Julia drove up from Brooklyn with her boyfriend Paul and spent the night here, we awoke early at 6am to head to Pomerance Park in Greenwich CT to shoot.

I had appropriated 3 empty 55 gallon drums for the photoshoot, and nervously drove them home fearing my suspiciously barrel filled Nissan Versa might attract the attention of the U.S government and the full force of homeland security would descend upon me in the form of Blackhawk choppers armed with artist seeking missiles. Yet, somehow I made it across the Tappan Zee without incident.

After 3 car trips to Pomerance, and one more stop at a Starbucks we were ready. We had Julia immerse herself in the water among the barrels and hold a strip of medium format film. Julia sleeps in her darkroom/bedroom in Brooklyn, among her chemicals. She fears for the repurcussions this may have on her and Paul’s health, but could not embrace the possibility of a world where she was unable to create her art. Ucchista-Matangini is the name of a Hindu goddess, whose worship is linked to the mastery of the arts and is often associated with pollution. We found this to be a fitting name for the piece illustrating Julia’s particular struggle and story.

We shot 5 plates, the 1st and 2nd being the best. This, like the John Flynn shoot, was a battle against an overcast day. The day was extremely cloudy, allowing little UV light to penetrate. No matter what our exposures were we couldn’t get shadow detail in the dark areas. In the future we are going to have to be more strict about shoot days, and call them if the day is too overcast.

This is the final wet plate taken with an IPhone:

And this was taken with the 5d Mk II:

The image was almost what we wanted, but the overcast skies prevented it from being the exact image we were going for. This project about featuring artists and their struggles, is another struggle in itself. Tackling a new and difficult medium, and holding the final images to our contemporary standards. Quite the learning experience!

The three of us immediately hit it off, and spent about 10 hours together prepping, shooting, varnishing, cleaning up, and grabbing a long needed meal after forgetting/not having enough time to eat for about… 27 hours.. well that is if you don’t count drinks from the night before and several cups of coffee as food.

Instagram photo of Nicole setting up:

Francesco expressed his feelings about being featured in the project as well as loaning us the camera:

Execution Project Interview: Francesco Fragomeni from Linked Ring Photography on Vimeo.

Nicole snapped this image of Francesco and I holding the unvarnished ambrotype.

Francesco’s particular struggle had to do with his overcoming time restrictions in his life, as he put it, “trying to add more hours into the day”. For a long period of time he was juggling a full time job, unwilling to sacrifice time from his relationship, and his personal photography. Francesco adapted a Spartan lifestyle of working in his darkroom from 4am until 9am, pulling a full work day at his full time job, and then making the evening time after work for his relationship. He needed all three aspects of his life to feel balanced an fulfilled, and the only solution was to add more hours into his day.

We came to Francesco at an interesting time, where he has been living for 2 months in an 8×8 trailer on the property of two world renowned large format photographers, Michael and Paula. His obstacles now reflect not only his past struggle of adding more time into the day, but now one of isolation and distance. This is something he has done in order to make the jump to understanding how to live a life where you are sustained mentally, physically, and financially by your art.

We had Francesco hold an hourglass and a bucket of sand. He sits in isolation in a field, appearing as if he’s in an almost dreamlike environment created by the shallow depth of field and nuances of the wet plate process. He is attempting to force more time into his day through the symbolism of pouring additional sand through his fingers into an already full hourglass.

This is the final image we came away with:

Music: Leaving Behind a Whaling Economy – Wess Meets West

He’s been a good friend for a long time and we immediately thought of featuring him for the project. We had taken this shot of him for his album last year, and ran with the concept for our own Execution photograph:

John’s creativity and dedication never cease to amaze us and once we started a dialogue with him we knew what we wanted to illustrate. When we asked him what his “sacrifice” or struggle was, his answer was identity. Struggling between who you think you are, who you really are, what you want to be, what you’re fans think you are, what you think they want to see, etc etc. It’s a common burden of the frontman, and John hasn’t been spared this himself.

We chose to depict John in 3 exposures, each referencing a part of the three part psyche (Id, Ego, Super-ego). We originally included a half drank bottle of whiskey for the shot, another relevant item to John and his personal struggles, but were unable to include it clearly in the final image due to the many lighting/chemical/space obstacles we encountered.

We shot between 3pm and 9pm, 4 plates. Excellent pours. 2 strobes. Slight window light. And absolutely no image, only strange artefacts and fogging. The last of the 4 had the faintest rim of John. We convinced him to stay the night, and woke up at sun rise the next day after doing research and talking until 4am.

Here’s a photo of the plate graveyard entirely from this shoot:

That morning we took all of the proper precautions that we had not known to take before running into all of these issues. We re-filtered and iced the Silver Nitrate bath, we mixed fresh hot weather developer at a stronger solution, we fixed a giant light leak in the side of the camera that we had somehow missed at our previous shoots and miraculously had still come away with plates, we used fresh egg whites to sub the sides of the plates instead of 6 month old egg whites that had been dragged 9000 miles across the U.S and through a few deserts, we upped the amount of lighting to 4 lights and moved them within inches of John, and we shot at the exact moment the sun was brightest (still diffused on an overcast day) through the attic window.

This is an Instagram photo of the lighting set up:

We came away at the end of the day with 2 images. One of which, I shit you not, disintegrated into a million tiny pieces as we put it into the water bath.
Of course, the Ambrotype gods only allow us 1 photo at a time and leave constant reminders about how they can so easily take away anything that we’ve come away with. What a fickle medium.

I spent 2 hours delicately wiping a developer haze off of this (our final and only) ambrotype with a wet cotton ball:

We learned so much from this shoot alone. So far every shoot we’ve cut ourselves, pushed our bodies to extreme lengths enduring heat and chemicals, and cried during every single shoot. Make an Ambrotype, Cry. That’s pretty much how it goes. And then after we gain some distance from the experience we end up accepting whatever has gone wrong, or whatever we originally didn’t like about the image, etc. You put so much of yourself into something, into these one of a kind objects, and you just expect perfection, and with an imperfect medium that’s just not always realistic. Making these is such an emotional experience, because of the pressures we’ve put on ourselves, the challenge of working in a difficult medium on this scale, and our own expectations of wanting to show everyone who funded our kickstarter how capable we are at executing this project. It may have taken 7 failures, but we finally got an image. It’s not the perfect image of what we wanted, but with all it’s imperfections it’s still this physical, fragile, object that is the culmination of so much effort, difficulty, and pure stubbornness. It’s almost something that just shouldn’t be, but then is, barely.

We awoke at 6am, after scouting until 4am and immediately began to clean and prep the 24×20 inch black glass, set up the camera, tent, and pour the chemicals. I had a particular rock face in mind that was near our campsite when I peaked over and saw Steve (a close friend, our graphic designer, and for this trip videographer/all around sanity maintainer to Nicole and myself) At first I assumed he was about to go to the bathroom, then I noticed he was actually holding his arm up to see the cliffs through the sun glare. How iconic I thought, and after recently becoming addicted to instagram, I of course had to instagram this photo.

We all looked at the image on instagram, and I decided to take one with my 5D MKII, to see the difference and have in case I ever wanted to edit it.

I was immediately irritated, liking the instagram photo taken with an IPhone with an instagram filter more than the one taken with a $2500 camera with a $2000 lens. And suddenly I realized that this was the shot that I wanted to take. Nicole came over and decided to wear the black dress, and we toyed with a few pose ideas but the original always came back the best. I snapped this as an exposure reference before calculating from 50 ISO to the collodions film speed of about .35 ISO.

After finishing the set up:

IPhone photo taken by Steve Trevathan

We finally ended up with this 20×24 Ambrotype:

This ambrotype has an intentional vignetting that appears when focusing on a distant subject due to the lens’ coverage. We still have a quite a few technical hurtles to overcome when shooting in a hot desert setting, but are quite pleased with how the camera and set up worked out. Can’t wait to start shooting more subjects for the Execution series!