Posts Tagged ‘fine art’
Photo-book PUBLISHED!!!
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In this vlog I’m sharing with you the moment filled with deep emotions when I got my self-published book in my hands, opening an exhibition and remind you that topshit happens!
You may purchase my book at www.borutpeterlin.com/shop
I’m receiving support from my patreons at www.patreon.com/borutpeterlin
First song: Dreams Come True by Rebecca Holden
Other two songs by David Cutter Music http://www.davidcuttermusic.com
New work from “Feels Like Home” project
Dear followers,
As you will notice, this video took me very long time to complete. Except the outro footage in the atelier, I’ve made it already a week ago, but it took me quite a while to finish it. Well, it’s here and I’m very satisfied with it. Video is a new medium for me and I am glad to receive a feedback from close friends, who have seen it unfinished, that they felt the peace that is the topic of my photography. I hope you will too. Leave a comment and subscribe to my YouTube channel, my FB page, my Instagram and this blog, of course!
Because Topshit does happen!!!!
First video about the Feels Like Home project – YouTube Link
Music from first 10 seconds intro by David Cutter music
The rest of the music by Janez Dovč / AcordeON
Disclaimer statement by Robert Kalman
Drone operator Shaggy
Photo project: PEACE / Vlog #24
Dear followers,
In this episode of Topshit Photography Vlog, I’m starting a new photographic project and I’m offering a glimpse into my creative process. I’m a caretaker of two cottages and eventually I’ll buy one. Before I’ll decide for the purchase I need to feel the space and how I function in it. And in this video I’ve started my photographic project that is a ritual of domestication of a living space. After a break of 21 year long relationship, I moved out of my house and to fight the feeling of failure I’ve started to make flower bouquets and photographing them and by doing that I’m creating a ritual of finding beauty in the living space that I find myself in, my appreciation of opportunity to be there.
Print 50x60cm or 24×20″
The enlargement size 50x60cm or 24×20″ is also on sale, but at the moment I couldn’t list it on EBay, but I will eventually. On EBay the price will be 240 USD, but if you want to buy it direct and save 10%, then email me on borutpeterlin@gmail.com
This video was supported by my Patreons and if you want to support me by one cup of tea every month, I am thankful!
https://www.patreon.com/borutpeterlin
About my blog. Oh, I’ve just realised I’ve missed the 10th anniversary of publishing on my blog and I’ve also missed 3000th post on my blog. Oh, well I guess I have to aim for 20th anniversary…
Music by one and only:
David Cutter
https://www.davidcuttermusic.co.uk
Ghost Window in wet plate collodion
Dear followers,
This vlog should be published earlier, but I am missing three of my cameras. All small ones, like analogue compact Rollei camera, GoPro 3+ and Nikon J5 cameras. I have no idea what happened to them. In 30 years I have not lost a camera. I almost did, but never really. This small cameras were in my bag and I was carry them always with me. It might be that I forgot my backpack somewhere, but is more likely that someone took it out of my car. Today’s thieves do not need to brake a window, to get in your car. When I went to Prague I was resting on a rest stop and a thief silently broke in my car, without leaving any damage or signs. He did this while I was resting in the car! But then I woke up and he fled. Without steeling anything. So it might be that it was stolen or not. I do not know. Too many things happening in my life right now and this is the price to pay. Although this event is annoying it does not put me off. In fact that is why I bought Nikon J5, because I didn’t want to use the almighty and all expensive Nikon D4! Imagine that would happen with my Nikon D4 and my expensive lenses!
Anyway… Here is my latest vlog where I continue working on my book A Father’s Tale. A photo-book is not an album of images. It is a sequence of images carefully narrated through each page. Just like when music notes are containing parts that are actually bringing the orchestra to quit down or even to a complete stop, also photo-book must have parts in the book where an eye will relax, digest, reflect.
My idea is that the photo-book of my daughters should contain images that on information level do not tell you anything about them, but the images are containing certain mood that is bringing the viewer’s attention away from the information level and building the story on emotional level.
So that is why I’ve decided to photograph this window. I could ask one of my daughters to stand there or even I could stand by the window, but I’ve decided to keep it calm and simple. It is just one image in the book, but important one.
I hope you will like the image and the video. Please subscribe and share. My plan is to build up large enough social network and sell my books directly to my audience. And/Or with the large enough social network, main stream publishers will be interested in publishing the book. So thank you for subscribing to my YouTube channel, to my blog, to FB page and to my Instagram.
LINK to eBay listing of the silver-gelatin print
LINK to eBay listing of the ambrotype
LINK to eBay listing of the albumen print.
Exhibition in Bratislava during Month of Photography
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During Month of Photography in Bratislava I was invited by Gallery Photon, to exhibit in the gallery of Embassy of Republic Slovenia. I decided to try something different, to present my work in old windows. I’m presenting a very intimate story of fears and delights being a parent and the window frames are emphasising hand made craft of my photographs and the effect of looking through window inside. I was very satisfied with the effect although needless to say I was full of doubts if this will actually work or make sense. I hope you agree, it does work.
I really wanted to exhibit this project, because as a teenager I saw the exhibition of Sally Mann and her project Immediate Family and this was for me very important personal motivation. Not only her work inspired me to photograph my family, but also it was in Sally Mann’s work I first time saw a 19th Century hand made photography used in contemporary art. On top of that, I am in the middle of divorce and setting up this work was so painful. I was totally ambushed by emotions from the past, while working on the exhibition. You don’t see that in the video, of course, but photographs are full of it.
Thank you to Gallery Photon, Dejan Sluga, Miha Colner, Embassy of R. Slovenia in Bratislava, Month of Photography in Bratislava and of course my family, Lučka, Brina and Alenka Peterlin.
On THIS link you can see the gallery of the images.
Here is a video few years old, where I’m talking about A Father’s Tale project, early version of the project.
Vlog About Street Photography
Dear followers,
Thank you for all the encouraging thoughts, gestures and actions. I am alive and kicking and after a very peculiar part of my life, I am getting back on track. I hope this video will inspire you and open new views on photography. No guidelines to follow, just inspiration to go out and do more photography!
If you appreciate my videos, this blog and my work on general and you might want to buy me a cup of tea or even a pizza every month, you can do this on my Patreon page.
Music by David Cutter Music – http://www.davidcuttermusic.co.uk
How to Publish a PhotoBook – Vlog E01/S01
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Dear followers,
I’ve been doing photography since I was a kid, from age 11 and when I was studying photography at FAMU Academy in Prague, we had to submit finalised project in a book form. I didn’t had the money for a book binder, so I’ve done it myself. I wasn’t a good bookbinder, but I loved the process of book making. I knew then that I want to do more books, I knew I love it, it’s perfect medium for my photography!
Fast forward 21 years later I’ve made about 30 handmade books, but I’ve published only one book, the book Tales from Gorjanci Hills and here is the link to the images. Technical note for photographers: those images are all shot on 6×7 format colour negative film! It was selectively illuminated and all done in one go. It took me 30-60 minutes for a single shot and because I wasn’t sure what has film recorded I repeated the take, so it was very slow progress.
Anyway all those years I tried to publish a book. I got great reviews and invitations for show, my work is published in many books if I mention few: Fabrica 10: From Chaos to Order and Back, Generation “74” and numerous art catalogues and magazines like Museum Duolun from Shanghai, Days Japan from Tokio, Nikon magazine, …
But as I’ve expressed myself frustratingly, I did not managed to publish an art book of my own. Now this is going to change. Today is 14th of May 2016. In one year time I will publish an art book of my own. My cunning plan is revealed in the video. The information that I saved for my next video is that I am not intending to do a video that will be a checklist of to-do list, no Sir, but I will make a video journal of my weekly steps in making the book published.
I was thinking which book should I publish first and on the end I’ve decided that if I want to make this vlog really interesting I have to start from scratch. I am starting a episode 01 of the series 01 without a single photograph taken. Don’t worry everything else is ready. On Monday rain will stop and then I’m off the leash!
Please do share the video, press like, subscribe and if you can afford to buy me one tea per month, please visit my patreon page. Lastly let me say I can’t answer all the email questions about the process, but I do answer to all the questions asked by my patrons, which is a great deal for 1$ a month support.
PS: To all my fellow european wet platers, I hope you will have a great time in Eindhoven at European Collodion Weekend, I am not coming because the very next weekend I’m traveling to Barcelona to Revela-T festival, where I have two workshops and a demonstration. Next year I will come to ECW with the new book, I’m sure of that!
PPS: Disclaimer voice by Fiona Campbell.
Inspiration & manipulation photography
I confess, I always fancied manipulation of photography. Paradoxically with introduction of Photoshop (I’ve learned PS 3.0 in year 1994) I’ve lost all the interest in this field and my work in the last 15 years is more or less documentarian nature, meaning, 99,9% of my digital images would pass world press photo standards. I can’t explain why.
About a year ago I’ve made a video about my work and analog manipulation of photography, it’s embedded at the bottom of this post. All the work mentioned is very old, like my last project Fairy Tales was done in 2001-02 and let me state that is not photoshoped at all! That was selectively illuminated landscape scenes, taken on colour negative film, format 6×7. Yes, it was very hard to wait for developed proof prints to see what have I’ve done last week and often go back and redo them.
About a year ago I was at a workshop on collodion glass negative retouching in George Eastman House and beside the techniques I’ve learned I’ve seen also some fascinating examples of retouched photographs. I mean authentic photographs that you may see only in books. Mentor Mark Osterman have shown us an examples from a collection of George Eastman House and that was really inspiring.
Anyway the time has come to start a new project, dealing with nature and image manipulation. I’ve picked few books from authors Peter Župnik, Pavel Pecha, Herman Pivk and Regina Anzenberger. Intentionally I’ve picked authors that are based in East Europe and although the quality of their work does not fall behind known western authors, you probably never heard about them. East-European photography is so underrated! It is so underrated by their own countries to start with! I hope you will appreciate my suggestions and their work.
In this video I’m presenting a print I’ve made from a retouched collodion negative. About a year ago I’ve made a video how I’m making the wet plate collodion negative and the salt print and now I’m publishing the result upgraded by my knowledge gained at George Eastman House. I will talk about my next project in the next videos, but for now I’m sharing with you my creative process, my inspiration and the aesthetic I admire. I think that on youtube there is way too much camera-review videos and photographers on general are putting too much emphasising on gear and not enough on photography and the creative process of photography, so this one is a little different. Very different.
I’m putting my retouched print on ebay, as an auction and by your bidding and buying my work, you support my endeavour in art. This blog is also crowd funded at Patreon.com. Thank you guys, I appreciate it!!!
PS: I’ve started to use professional video-editing software and big thanks to Vid Klančičar for the crash course how to use it.
Christmas special video on albumen printing and wet plate collodion negative
Ha, I finally finished my Christmas special video, few days after Christmas, but never mind. In this video I’m researching different lenses from Petzval Gasc & Charconnet from 1860’s to Voigtlander Heliar from 1930’s to Schneider Tele-Xenar from 1970’s. Then I’m making albumen prints from wet plate collodion negatives and I’m analysing the results. It’s my home-work for my new project on Schengen border that is wrapped in barbed wire, but more about it later.
Of course I’m listing the best print on Ebay as an auction from $ 0,99 USD and I’ve set it for five days, so it will be ending at the end of the year. Party like it’s 1999! I’m really happy with this work, it’s my final home-work, before starting a new project. As you probably know, European Union is a union of different countries, but the official – police- border is not set at the final frontier of the EU, but it’s actually set on the border of Slovenia and Hungary, if we are talking about south east border. HERE is a link about the Schengen Area of 26 countries and HERE is how it looks in barb wire! I will devote a post about my new project, probably before the end of the year.
About the print, I hope you like it, it’s the best I can do. It’s the closest I got to the perfect albumen prints done by Eadweard Muybridge, that I’ve seen in George Eastman House. In the print I’ve invested absolutely all the knowledge I have about wet plate collodion negatives, albumen printing processes, large format cameras and photography on general.
And you can tell, I’m not taking any shortcuts! Some people prefer to drive a car, fast cars, but I prefer to walk. Sure, it takes much more effort and yes, I might arrive at the same place much later then everybody, but when we will arrive to our goals, although standing side by side, we will not be the same people, as we started the journey. And… I prefer to walk, I prefer to do hand-made photography.
If you want to learn the process properly, you need to go to George Eastman House, where you will see vintage prints from Masters of Photography and you will be thought by a master of photography, Mark Osterman! If you are based in EU, you don’t need me to express my condolence, but you can also take some of my topshit workshops. Schedule for 2016 is coming soon.
Last but not least, I must tell you that I’m over flooded with emails concerning details about the process. I can’t answer all of them, but I do make a reply to every question asked by my patrons, so if you want to join the crowd, please visit my patreon.com/borutpeterlin site.
Thank you for supporting my work, either trough bidding on my prints, sharing my videos and foremost being my patreon. I appreciate it a lot!
Retouching of wet plate collodion negative
A month ago I was in George Eastman House in Rochester on a workshop of glass negative retouching. I made a personal resolution to do a pilgrimage to GEH once a year, as it’s was very inspiring experience to learn from fantastic mentors, Mark Osterman and Nick Brandreth . Furthermore at these workshops you are invited in the GEH’s collection where examples from history of photography are presented.
Retouching basically means drawing and I do not know how to draw or better I have still much to learn about drawing. Nevertheless I’m satisfied with the results presented in the video. Of course, retouching of eyes is the most difficult thing, but my clumsy retouching is what makes the image scary. If you look at the albumen print from a retouched negative, you would never guessed that it’s retouched, if you would not see it doing and if you were not an expert in retouching. I trust my wife’s opinion, she is very cruel in her judgement toward my work and she said it’s OK. And her opinion with all due respecte overrates Mark Osterman’s opinion, which I know it’ll be critical. I totally follow his teaching, but on the aesthetic point of view we often respectfully disagree. I love his work, perfect in any view, but you see my character is different. I’m not a tidy person, I don’t find my plates messy. I could make them totally technically perfect, but I welcome some stains on corners of my plates. Like my sink, it’s not dirty! It simply isn’t! Yes it does has many silver stains and I will not clean them with aggressive chemicals, because that would just be Sisyphus’s work! So under topshit doctrine, cleaning a sink basically means irresponsible pollution of environment and consequently burning in hell! Ha!!!
Where was I?
I learned a lot at this workshop. Like I’ve down hundreds of salt prints already, but observing Mark making salt prints I’ve learned many small tricks. One of it is the following. For sensitising salt paper we usually use cotton ball and then we trow it away. What Mark does is after senzibilisation he squeezes the remaining silver nitrate into a jar and then recover this polluted silver. How brilliant is that?! Just think how much silver nitrate is thrown away with filtering, sensitising and so on? In a month time with this practice I saved almost one decilitre of silver nitrate! I can’t write all the tips & tricks I’ve learned from Mark, since that would be more suitable for a book, then a blog 🙂
Let me finish this blogpost with a very comforting information that if with retouching you screw up the negative, you can undo it! For instance. If you add too much graphite on your negative, you can wipe it away with fine powder of a cuttle fish. That’s the white powder I was using in the video. With it you can remove unwanted retouching. You can also do the more drastic measure like removing whole varnish from the negative and with it the mistake you’ve made. Remember, the retouching is not happening on the collodion, but on the varnish.
That’s the main difference between dry silver-gelatine negatives and collodion negatives. Silver-gelatine negative can be scratched into emulsion whereas collodion has very very thin layer of silver (that’s what it makes it the sharpest photography medium ever) and if you would try to scratch silver from collodion negative, you would scratch it right trough.
So, Mark gave me also information on collodion-chloride paper and when I was at home, I try it, but I haven’t dry the paper sufficiently and the collodion-chloride paper got stuck on the collodion negative. I basically ruin it, the negative can not be used anymore. Then I took alcohol, diluted it to 85% and start washing the negative in the alcohol. The varnish dissolved and with it also collodion-chloride emulsion. This is not the work for light hearted one, because you can easily ruin the negative, especially if the collodion used for the negative was old. Old collodion is fragile and lost it’s flexibility and therefor it’s very fragile. There was a small chance that Mark was using very old collodion, so I washed the varnish away and revarnished the plate again. Now I can retouch it again.
The two photographs that I’ve made are available for purchase on Ebay. I added also the third one, but this one is from unretouched negative. I made it later then the video, my wife says that it’s my best photograph and so it is. You don’t want to argue with my wife, OK? Trust me on this one!!!
Please follow the link bellow. I’m blogging for already nine years, I’ve wrote more then 1000 blog posts and I’m receiving emails to publish more, make more videos. I would love to, that would be my dream job, but as a professional photographer, I need to make a living and support my family first. That said, if you would consider to give me a tip for the videos I make and the information I share, it would be most appreciated. You can tip me via Paypal and my paypal account is borutpeterlin@gmail.com
Thank you.
TOPSHIT PHOTOGRAPHY blog 