Van Dyke Brown…on a Very Grey Day

As a wet snow streams from the sky, my husband and I are dipping our toes deeper into the Alternative Process Photography pool.

Today’s science project, which is a great way to describe Alternative Process, as my cellar looks more like the laboratory of a mad scientist than my old laundry room. But I digress, our project for today has been an alternative process called Van Dyke Process. We used a contact print try and a light bulb to produce them.

Planning a head we mixed the chemicals to make our Photosensitive paper for the prints a few days earlier. Letting them sit and cure.  A visit to the art store and a rummage through my studio for hot press watercolor papers added the final necessary pieces to our bag of tricks.

This morning we tapped the paper to a stiff board, in our case some plexiglass sheets and coated each sheet evenly with the Van Dyke mixture, making sure it was coated finally with two complete layers. Then we left the sheets to dry. We found the heating room in our small house to be a good warm, low light space to do this project.

When these dried we chose some whole plate and 4×5 negatives from earlier shoots which were of good strong contrast, then we placed emulsion side to emulsion side and secured in the contact print tray.

With a lamp as a direct light source….since this is a gray and snowy day….we left the tray under the lamp for over an hour, checking periodically for exposure. This can also be accomplished by direct sunlight if we lived in a country that has sun at this time of year. (I am not complaining as I am praying the snow outside keeps coming and builds up)

Once we reached what we believed to be a proper exposure we removed the paper and negative from the tray and began a wash under the faucet. Rinsing off all the emulsion and then quickly it went into the Fixative bath we had prepared. Immediately we could see the dark tones becoming darker and the whites brighter. Then it went into a bath too soak properly before being hung to dry.

I tried to capture a few photos of the experiment to share with you as we went along today. Great project of discovery on a day like today.

To view the slideshow on Flickr of the process click below: