At the end of this past semester I had the opportunity to participate in the "Pele Iron Pour" put on by Cam Choy, head of the sculpture department. These things are way too much fun. Lots of energy, excitement with the preparation of the molds, and tension with the presence of molten iron. We all divided up into four person teams and tooks turns getting a heavy bucketfull of molten iron from the blast furnace, and trying to hit the little bitty pouring hole in the mold. Some teams seemed to have put more on the ground than in the mold. That created immediate excitement as there was a scurry to throw dirt on top of the molten iron so as not to cause injury. I kept myself busy taking pictures (ugh, with a digital camera) and joined them into this collage. If you click on the image you should get a larger version which will allow a better look.

What I posted on these intaglio prints earlier were exploratory monotypes where I was trying to figure out how to do them. These prints are the intaglio version which are much richer and more interesting. It's the only image I worked on the entire semester and I ended up printing 60 prints of it. What I learned from that is there are endless ways to interpret a print. Just because we have reached a print that we like doesn't mean there are many more other interpretations to be discovered. Some perhaps even better than what we first achieved!

Here's the balance of the intaglio prints from this fall semester.

Most of these are the remaining assignments from my Commercial Photography class at UW-L. A couple were taken at the Badlands National Park were I escaped to over Thanksgiving break. The portrait was taken with my latest camera, a Crown Graphic. It was made somewhere around in the early 60's. If you remember the old pictures of the press photographers with their rather largish hand held cameras with the large flash bulb attachment, that's what it is. Basically it's a hand held 4X5 camera, and of course, large format black and white is my passion.