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There are few more interesting buildings in New York City than the Flatiron Building. Built over 100 years ago it was one of the tallest buildings in the city. It has been photographed many times over the years (my favorite is Steiken’s), and this version I created through the Bromoil process.
I’m back in the darkroom again and this time I am working from digital negatives. I have dialed in Fomabrom Variant IV paper, which has become my favorite paper (that is currently available) for working with the Bromoil process.
This image is the remains of a large room in the Administration Building at Henryton (glsmyth.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/henryton).
I have started a project of shooting people who are a small, but necessary part of my life. These are people who adorn the areas I visit, but with whom I do not interact. This particular one is of a woman in the Long Island Railroad Train Station who was hurrying to her train. As she was a fleeting part of my life, I captured her in this fleeting manner.
This is a Bromoil image, which I believe helps portray the image closest to its intention. The original image was captured digitally, then printed in the darkroom through a digital negative.
This is the sister image to one I uploaded recently. I like the feeling in this image, as it takes me back many years. Comparing the two images one will see that one of them has been flipped, though I’m not telling which one.
This is a Bromoil image originally shot on Kodak High-Speed Infrared film. More Bromoil images of mine can be seen at glsmyth.com/Gallery.asp?G=Bromoil.
This image is one on which I have been working on and off for several months. There are so many ways to print it, and most of them have found their way into the trash can.
This is a Bromoil image from a series of images I took of people in New Castle, Delaware.
I have been taking pictures of forgotten places and abandoned items recently, and this is an example. Behind a store lies discarded items that meant something in the past, but are part of the rubble of the present. I decided to print this as a Bromoil, which turned out to be one of the more difficult images to print, but I think that the intention properly fits the process.
A while back I offered a post called Steps. My intention for the image was to use it to create a Bromoil print. After calibrating the curve that needed to be applied to the paper I decided to use (Fomabrom Variant IV), I printed a red negative version of the image onto a clear substrate. This allowed me to use it as a negative that I could use to contact print a traditional silver gelatin image, which is the first part of making a Bromoil print.
The ability to do this means that if I choose to abandon film at some point in the future, I will still be able to create Bromoil prints. I am not concerned that film will go away any more than black and white went away with the introduction of color, but it not only allows me to carry one less camera, but also manipulate existing images with the ease of Photoshop.
I finally purchased a decent printer and began my move toward digital negatives last weekend, spending too many hours calibrating things to work well with Fomapan Variant IV paper, the paper I have been favoring for use with the Bromoil process. I selected a couple of images that I had taken while on vacation in North Carolina a couple of years ago and used them as tests, and this is the first Bromoil made from a digital negative for me.
I have been shooting images of many houses and buildings that have seen better days, and this image is part of that series. With this particular house, the entire front of the house was gone, so I stood just outside and shot into the building. This jar was full of a white powder, and without a label I have no idea what it was. I have also printed this image reversed, with the jar on the left, and am contemplating which one I like better.
I meet with a group of photographers each month who are primarily interested in large format and alternative process photography.
Recently we had a chance to use some rather nice studio flash equipment so one of the women brought her daughter for us to use as a model. I decided to use my Certo Six camera (a medium format “folder” made in East Germany sometime after WWII), and not wanting to take a straightforward image, asked the model to move her head back and forth.
The exposure time was one second, and the shutter opened as her head was turned to my left, and closed just as the flash went off and her head had turned to my right. I did a series of these images, but liked this one because the left eye lined up with the right eye.
To add a level of abstraction to the image, I printed it as a Bromoil print.
This is the third of my three Bromoil street photography images. I am using this process to add an element of abstraction from the scene.
Everywhere I’ve ever been, people make lines and force the cars to go within these lines. In New York City things are done the opposite – taxi cabs create the lines and make people go within them.
