Wnek Pond, as I have named it, in honor of a close friend and terrific photographer Peter Wnek. Please take a moment to check out this very talented photographer’s web page linked in his name above. Peter and I have been friends for 30+ years. Knowing I love winter time photography, particularly ice formations, Peter reached out to me back in January of 2018 and asked if I wanted to join him at a frozen swampy area he had discovered several days earlier. To be completely fair, Peter had showed me almost this exact photo he made with his digital camera a few days prior to returning with me on the 27th of January. He felt as I did, it was best seen in B&W. I never like standing in other people’s tripod marks, but in this small area, Peter had clearly captured the best imagery “his” pond offered that day. At that moment in time I justified making the image because my final printing would be different than Peters’.

     I was most drawn to the random shapes created by pockets of decaying plant life giving off some form of gases. The general symmetry of the image contours up a celestial body in a far off universe. The wet boggy area is very small, and in fact does not always have standing water come winter time as I have returned in subsequent years to find a barren field with no water to speak of. A series of incremental steps must be followed to transform the cell phone shot seen here to the final rendering of this month’s image. The outer space concept certainly pushed my darkroom printing skills to the limit in creating a very dark background for the lighter “object” to essentially float in space. However, had I increased film development to exaggerate contrast in the negative that would have further spread apart the slightly less brightness on the right side of the ice formation. The act of simply balancing those tonalities from side to side in the final silver print were a problem unto itself. In the end, the less than perfect negative allowed me to get to the final vision I had for the print.

     Lastly, as one might imagine I had to “print down” the surrounding ice to near black to project the floating object concept. As a result the two interesting cracks in the ice were now extremely difficult to see. Each of those cracks added another level of mystery to the entire image. To restore that sense of mystery each crack in the ice underwent a painstaking process called bleaching. A weak solution of Potassium Ferricyanide is applied with a tiny brush to just the thin cracks. This process “removes” density at a disproportionate rate, in other words, more density is removed from the lighter area while leaving the very dark area relatively unchanged. When it’s done 3 or 4 times the result is the contrast is magnified, or exaggerated in just the tiny area that comes in contact with the Potassium Ferricyanide. It’s all part of the incremental steps taken by the artist to recreate what the “mind’s eye saw” at the time the negative was made. To my point, almost no image I make is a literal rendering of reality, as clearly seen in a cell phone shot of the camera setup. Interestingly, the idea of an object floating in outer space is what I saw, the actual area of the image is about the size of a bathroom hand towel !

     On another note, I like to split-tone my silver images to create a greater sense of depth and dimension in the image. The warmth the process creates always takes place in the higher values, with winter time ice that seems to go against the general perception of cold and ice, at least mine. The weekend just prior to this Story’s release I will host a Gum-Bichromate over Palladium workshop here in my darkroom while being the only Connecticut participant amongst 6 photographers. The gum process allows a slight coloration of the maker’s choice to be applied to different tonalities from a digitally generated file born from my original film negative. With that option I hope to create wintertime imagery with a more neutral black and then biais the high values with a blue cast, as opposed to the added warmth seen in this month’s image. I think that could make for an exciting variation to my work while still preserving the integrity of the original concept and composition of the film captured image.