Saturday
February 21
8-10 PM
Photoworks Gallery @ Glen Echo Park
Silent Auction and Photography Raffle
Champagne and Desserts
Black and White Attire Suggested
Come Celebrate the Photoworks Community!
Step 1: RSVP lgmphotoworks@gmail.com
Step 2: Purchase your Gala Ticket
2 Ticket Options
Platinum Gala Ticket
$150 ticket admits 1 and includes SIGNATURE PHOTOGRAPH
Silver Gala Ticket
$50 ticket admits 1 person to the event
Click Here for Ticket Purchase
Final Notes:
1. Space is limited!
2. We recommend that you purchase your tickets before Feb 7th
3. Visit www.glenechophotoworks.org to purchase tickets
4. RSVP lgmphotoworks@gmail.com to save your spot
Questions? lgmphotoworks@gmail.com
Visit us on facebook at glenechophotoworks
Just a reminder we’re having the closing reception for our Silver Visions: Large Format Photography show at the River Road Unitarian Church on Saturday, May 3, from 3-5 pm. Please come out and see the work (and maybe even buy something??? Prices are very reasonable!).
Burma Restaurant, Chinatown, DC
The church is located at 6301 River Rd, Bethesda, MD 20817, but the entrance is on Whittier Boulevard (turn on to Whittier from River Road and make the second left into their driveway – the immediate left is the exit from their parking lot).
For more information about the exhibit or visiting hours or directions, see:
Here’s one instance of where Richard Daley’s admonition to “get out, vote early, vote often” is actually legitimate! Please go visit my entry in the Onward Compé `14 competition, and vote for me in the Peoples’ Choice category. You can vote daily, so please do!
If you’ve been following my blog long enough, you know I teach antique and historic processes at Glen Echo Photoworks. I have been teaching a one-on-one master class for the last several weeks. Last session we shot some negatives and processed them in Pyrocat HD, a staining developer. This week, we printed some of the negatives we shot, as well as an old negative Anh, my student, had in his portfolio.
My Portrait by Anh TranJefferson Memorial, Cherry Blossoms
The Jefferson Memorial shot was his existing negative – in the silver gelatin print, the dome of the Jefferson was blended in to the sky at the brightest highlight. You can see even from this phone-cam snapshot that there is tonal separation between the dome and the sky, where the dome is actually the brighter highlight, but still retains detail. THAT is what printing in palladium is all about – that rich, delicate level of detail it is capable of recording in highlights and midtones. And the cherry blossoms have an extra delicacy about them too.
Me With Portrait
Here’s a shot he took of me holding the portrait he did last week. This could probably use just a little more contrast, but not bad for his say 5th ever palladium print 🙂
Me Showing my Portfolio for Colors of Night
I brought along my portfolio of the actual prints I’m putting in the Colors of Night show for him to take a peek at. Here I am showing the prints.
After a LOONG weekend of playing with my printer to get it to cooperate (running out of four different inks @ $60/cartridge, figuring out how to solve problems with head strikes on my prints, running out of paper at $115/box thanks to the aforementioned ink shortages and head strikes), I now have my show completely printed. Eight prints are already framed and ready to go, the remaining 12 are going to be framed tomorrow, and the show hung on Tuesday after work. I’ve done shows before, and of course it’s always hard work, but this is the biggest show I’ve done in terms of volume. Even my biggest past Artomatic was probably 12 prints. I’m very psyched about the show. Here’s a recap for those who can’t make it to the opening (REMINDER: August 2, 7-10 PM, Mad Momos Restaurant, 3605 14th Street NW, Washington DC). This exhibit pays tribute to the parts of Washington I pass through on a regular if not daily basis. I want to show what this town looks like to a resident, as well as showing it in an unfamiliar way even to those folks who do see these things all the time. As I mentioned in my blurb about the reception, I love the way color distorts and transforms at night because we no longer have a single, unidirectional light source of uniform color and quality. I’ve started these photos with late evening/sunset/twilight and progress into deep night to capture the feeling of that time of day. I hope these photos express that sense of drawn out time and transformed space, be it through blurred motion or the interplay of lights.
Crane, Traffic, 14th Street, DuskNellies Sports Bar, From 9th StreetGhibellinaLe DiplomatePan Lourdes, in colorCavalier LiquorU Street EveningNational Portrait Gallery, TwilightPearl Dive Oyster Palace, Vespa, 14th Street14th & Rhode Island Avenue, MoonBarrel House LiquorsStudio Theater, from P StreetStudio Theater, from 14th StreetUnder the Whitehurst FreewayKennedy Center, Potomac River, NightWater Street, GeorgetownWashington Harbor, Cherry Blossoms, TaxiCyclist returning his Bikeshare, National Portrait Gallery, SunsetU Street Platform, Oncoming TrainSteps, National Portrait Gallery
If any of you have ever produced a photography exhibit, or any other art exhibit for that matter, you’ll have an understanding of just how complicated an effort this is. I’m lucky in that I am able to do my promotional work online for the most part (this blog, email blasts, internet forums, etc), and I already have promotional postcards printed from the last time I exhibited some of this work. It would not surprise me if I did a truly serious accounting of what it cost to put this show up on the wall and the bill came in somewhere north of $2500. I know the framing bill alone is in the region of $1100-$1200. Postcards? about $200 for good quality printing from Modern Postcard. Paper and ink? $300. And that’s just the obvious, not counting the two years it took to shoot the images, the film and processing, the editing process, the dinner bribe for my friend who helped with the editing, and all the hardware and software (21.5″ iMac, Epson V750 scanner, Epson 3880 printer, Photoshop CS5, SilverFast AI 8, Gretag-Macbeth EyeOne calibration software and hockey-puck). To say nothing of 20 years of accumulated experience required to produce images like these.
I’m having an opening reception for my exhibit, “The Colors of Night” on Friday, August 2, from 7-10pm at Mad Momos Restaurant, 3605 14th Street NW. The exhibit runs from August 2 to the end of October.
From the Mad Momos invite:
Mad Momos is proud to present photographs by DC area photographer, Scott Davis. Please join us for the opening reception to enjoy the photos, meet the photogrpaher and sip on complimentary California Champagne.
What is the color of night? It is indigo, it is fluorescent cyan, it is neon reds, yellows and blues. It is sodium-vapor pink, and glowing incandescent orange. It is all of the above, filled in with the colors of your imagination. It is the color of time slowed down, motion blurred, things and people half-seen through their background, perceptions distorted.
Le Diplomate
I have been shooting a lot of night-time work both in black-and-white and color, for several years now. Photographing long exposures at night gives you a creative freedom to accept serendipitous happenstance in your work that you would reject if caught in 1/60th of a second. Blurred motion becomes a good thing. People become icons. Cars are ghostly, their tail lights and headlights reduced to abstractions and records of things that were, like handwriting on paper. Colors become incredibly rich and even more important, since sometimes it is only by color that you can define and understand an object. The mixed lighting you find in a photograph of a night scene changes our perception of mood in a way you aren’t aware of when you are there – your brain color-corrects light sources automatically so things look “right”, but capturing them on film, which can only record what’s actually there without interpretation, reminds us that we do in a manner of fashion walk through the world with rose-colored glasses.
I’m showing seven of my platinum/palladium and gum bichromate prints at ArtDC as part of The Chemical View, an exhibit of alternative process photographic prints.
Who: artdc Gallery
What: The Chemical View
Where: 5710 Baltimore Ave., Hyattsville, MD 20781
Exhibition dates: 5-26-13 to 6-23-13
Reception: Saturday, 6-1-13 12 to 7-10pm
Web: http://www.artdc.com
Curator: Barry Schmetter
Alternative-Process Photography Exhibition to Open at the artdc Gallery on June 1
The Chemical View: Alternative Process Photography will open on Saturday, June 1 at the artdc Gallery in Hyattsville, Maryland. The show will highlight the work of eight Washington-area artists working in the medium of alternative process photography. The show will include examples of tintypes, ambrotypes, platinum and palladium prints, cyanotypes, Van Dyke prints, bromoils, gum prints, and hand-painted liquid emulsion prints.
“This is a rare chance to see a wide range of handmade prints that represent the gamut of chemical-based photographic processes.”, said Barry Schmetter, the show’s curator. “The artists are drawing on the history of the photographic process to explore contemporary themes.”
The artists included in show are: Scott Davis, Henry Friedman, Eddie Hirschfield, Carole Hollander, Suzanne Izzo, Joanna Knox, Barry Schmetter, and George L. Smyth.
Regular readers of my blog will probably remember the notice I posted last year about Katherine Thayer’s passing. Katherine was a tremendous gum bichromate printer and an extremely generous teacher of the process. Lightbox gallery in Astoria, Oregon is organizing a commemorative exhibit and has put out a call for entries for the show (link above).
To reprint the notice on the LightBox web page,
LIGHTBOX PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY CALL FOR ENTRIES
Two Friends Who Never Met
An Exhibit of Gum Bichromate Prints
In Memory and in Honor of Katharine Thayer
featuring the work of Katharine Thayer and Diana Bloomfield
with a juried exhibit of Gum Bichromate Prints
Juror – Diana Bloomfield Diana’s bio
We welcome you to share in the beauty of the hand-made print, and specifically, the gum bichromate print,
with a juried exhibit as part of this memoriam for Katherine.
This exhibit serves to illuminate Katharine’s artistry— her admiration for, dedication to, and mastery of gum printing.
This exhibit also celebrates her legacy and her years-long friendship with Diana.
I had a mental picture of the kind of photograph I wanted to make. I had never seen any photographs like them, but I was determined to find a way to make them, these pictures I saw in my head. Their colors were soft and relatively unsaturated, but with a kind of glow about them . . . I set out first to teach myself to print in gum, then to adapt the method to produce the kinds of pictures I wanted to make, and have been making them ever since – Katharine Thayer – katharinethayer.com
Katherine Thayer was a long-time resident of Oregon and a masterful gum bichromate printer. She was also a generous teacher to those who struggled to learn this ultimately rewarding, yet often challenging, 19th century printing process. In Katharine’s words, “learning gum printing involves some trial and error, and there’s no short cut to mastery; a person successful in mastering the process will have some staying power and possess a sense of humor and some tolerance for failure.”
Katharine was also a decades-long member of “The List” , an Alternative Process listserv— a free and open online discussion list related to all things ‘alternative’ in the photographic printing world. For Katharine, of course, this meant gum printing. Currently, over 600 people world-wide are members of this List, and this is where Diana Bloomfield, a native North Carolinian, photographer and printer, first met Katharine. In the middle of teaching herself to make gum prints, Diana gleaned invaluable bits of information from those on the List, but she learned the most from Katharine and from her website (KatharineThayer.com). In the midst of all the questions, and in-between Katharine’s tireless mentoring, the two became good friends. They corresponded via email almost daily, and they were once in a group pinhole exhibit together in the Seattle area. Diana was also in a group exhibit at LightBox, where Katharine was a frequent visitor. Still, they never met.
Ok – I managed to get my FotoWeekDC portfolio contest entry submitted. With three hours to spare, give or take. I’m submitting nine images from my Colors of Night series. I finally got to take advantage of my (rather pricey) large format film holders for my scanner, and re-scanned some of my 5×7 negatives from San Francisco. I submitted 5 San Francisco and 4 Washington DC night shots. Fingers crossed, they’ll go over well.
dcphotoartist 