Badlands National Park, South Dakota - Valley View
Mushroom Bells - Shore Acres Oregon
Badlands NP, SD
A lot of experimentation was involved here. I saw Dan Burkholder’s images online and was intrigued with the look that he achieved. I’ve been printing platinum/palladium since around 2015 and have found it to be a challenging process. Doing this has added a whole new level to the degree of difficulty. First I had to figure out how to make a decent color print on platinum/palladium watercolor paper. I had about six papers to choose from and fount that my favorite platinum paper from Hahnemuhle worked best. I had to create a paper profile for my printer but found that I had to decrease the black output and saturate the colors. Then I discovered that when I created registration marks and made the negative and print with the same size and same registration marks a problem in size resulted. Just the process of printing the color image on the Hahnemuhle paper expanded one millimeter in the long dimension and a tiny bit in the short dimension. I had to remake the negative 1mm longer and about 1/10 mm in the short dimension in order to make the registration close enough. I have yet to prove theories about why this is happening. More to come.
After all that and many wasted sheets of paper, I found that I need to give about 1/2 exposure to the platinum print or everything gets too dark. These three images are the only ones that approach what I’m after.
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