using liquid light

[Dezereelynn]

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with liquid light. I have to start thinking about what i want to do for my senior project for this coming year, and i had seen some neat things done with liquid light but have not tried it out yet myself. I had an idea that maybe i could put liquid light on wood and make pictures that way, My teacher told me that it would give me a negative if i used it in a pinhole camera. At first i was like hmm but then thought would it be possible to make a pinhole on photo paper then do a wet contact print on the wood with the paper or would it be neat to just do the negative on the wood? Please any feedback is great good or bad i need to know if im wasting my time with a crazy idea or if im capable of it. thanks

[berrywise]

I haven't used it since high school but back then we'd get ourselves big six foot by six foot sheets of canvas and paint it on. Then we'd turn our enlarger on it's side and in the drama room's black box theater we would would make monster sized prints from little ole 35mm negatives.

We then developed them in D-76 using those plastic swimming pools you can get for little kids.

Also did a cool gallery submission where I used liquid light on hard boiled eggs and did a series of portraits that turned out pretty cool.

[Asylum Steve]

As bw knows, you can do some pretty wild stuff with LL. My experience was fairly conservative, simply creating poster-size prints on art paper by coating and then traditional enlargement and large tray processing.

You really need to just experiment. Not only are different materials unpredictable, but results on the same material can vary from try to try.

The two basic ways of processing LL material are either tray (including the great "kiddie pool" improvisation that bw mentioned) or spray. Using spray bottles for the chemistry usually works better with bulky materials such as wood or plastic that would be impractical to soak in solution...

[SmartWombat]

I never heard of liquid light before.
Perhaps I'd have to use blown eggs, not hard boiled, but a set of portraits of my friends on eggs would be rather an interesting project.

[megan]

I've never actually used it, but one of my roommates in college used it on old window panes to great effect.

You are capable - and it's not a waste of time. If it were me, I would try it on something simple, first, like paper or glass, just to get a feel for it. Then once I got a little confidence with the process, move onto more experimental materials... then maybe combine it with the pinhole. Pinholes in and of themselves are fun but came with their own set of frusrations! Good luck!

[Photo-John]

I'm not sure how sensitive Liquid Light is. But I've seen people use it on all kinds of surfaces. I always wanted to try it but never got around to it. I used to do ceramics and thought it would be cool to combine pottery and photography.

The sensitivity is a concern if you want to use a paper negative. If you want to try a pinhole, I'd use photolith in the pinhole to get a film negative that you can use for a contact print. Digital technology makes a lot of stuff possible now that used to be really tough. You can make a negative from any digital image now, using Photoshop and transparency film in an inkjet printer. I'd say, figure out exactly what you want to do and then work backwards from there, considering all available technology.