Gum Bichromate and Unanswered Questions

So, I’ve been working on a pinhole photography project, and how it speaks to the beginning of a medium (in reference to the camera obscura). I really want to “port” the idea of a pinhole camera (with little or no optics) to that of our so called “modern” capture, using CCDs.

Hence the struggle: How to bring a medium which much exist in a completely dark space into a space that people can relate to the object… de-mystify the object and begin to comprehend the object more clearly.

Thoughts on Gum this week led me into an old alternative process in photography called Gum Bichromate, which is still a wonderful and commonly complex process to envoke involving multiple exposures on one print and perhaps even some pigments (google gumoil for some amazing photography).

Still, I think either Gum Bichromate or another process similar to it, called cyanotype may be the answer I’m looking for. Both of them, or at least one, can be done without a dark room, one of which develops using UV light over a long period of time (cyanotypes were commonly developed using sunlight over a period of around 6 hours).

I’d like to mix this idea with the idea of digital burn on a CCD, and make it a realtime event. Gum Bichromate may make this possible. All of this reinforces a problem I’ve found with digital art of late, which is that it is completely ephemeral, and without any footprint.

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Add comment September 11th, 2005

Blue Screen Studio

I was helping some friends, (Gorilla Kingdom) Gabe and Dana, with a project they are developing. We shot for two days in a blue screen studio in Queens. It was quite an intricate process, and everyone on the set seemed to be learning a lot.

I was particularily interested in the minute details one had to keep track of when lighting the scrim (the back wall of the blue screen), as well as the attention to spill on the actors. Any blue that appeared on the actors may not get taken away by the post production, leaving a blue discoloration on the final product. This led to a wide variety of lighting and flagging techniques, which were all quite fun to troubleshoot and watch others troubleshoot.

The first and second days of the shoot are linked here and here , as flash streaming movies. Enjoy.

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Add comment September 7th, 2005