Long Exposure UV Camera - [01]

An Intro/Recap of my past work from 2021-2022

ART

1/24/20233 min read

In 2019 I uncovered my dad's dusty old 4x5 Crown Graphic, stuck a piece of van-dyke-process sensitized paper into it, and was astounded when it actually produced a photograph.

In writing that, I realize that maybe I should have expected that outcome, but being a newcomer to film photography at the time (couldn't even open the camera initially), it was a magical moment. From there my trajectory towards the multi-colored 3d-printed hunk of plastic, fabric, glass, and tape began.

The First Tests were... artsy?

These Images were taken on the previously mentioned 4x5 Crown Graphic

(negatives shown in brown)

Partially driven by an idea of "cheap" film, but also just inspired by the idea of re-discovering photography, I initially experimented with self-made paper negatives. I used Van-Dyke Brown chemistry as the sensitizer. This choice was mainly because I had some on hand from some alternative-process printing I was doing. The Van-Dyke process had some other perks to it as well. It was quite cheap on a per-print basis, and notably it was only sensitive to UV light so there was no requirement for a darkroom setup which I did not have on hand.

The first test failed miserably, absolutely nothing came out after developing. But, I continued on experimenting and realized that the exposure time of paper was extremely long (6+ hours for a reasonable photo). But, The process did work.

Once I got that working, and had my parameters relatively tuned, i got nerd-sniped by this blog post discussing false-color UV photography. (See right), photo credits go to "bvf" on the UV Color Photography forum. The basic idea is that you take several images of the same subject in B&W with filters for different spectral ranges. So, inspired by that, and completely forgetting the initial goal of not spending money, I spent $150 on some fancy UV filters from edmund optics.

After some research on the absorbtion spectrum of Cyanotype prints, i decided on 3 lenses for a false red, green, and blue band.

What did I do with these fancy filters?

I stuck em' in some cardboard..

Once I had the attachment process "figured out" the photo itself took 3 days to take. The already long exposure for a single photo was extended due to the filter, and on top of that, I had to take 3 of them to construct a single photo.

After 3 days, the process worked, ish.

Long Exposure UV Camera - [01]

The First Tests were... artsy?

What did I do with these fancy filters?

I stuck em' in some cardboard..

To Be Continued...

combined "false-color" Photo

Other Experiments

Some other Tests

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