Current Work by Daniel A.Carrillo

Here is my wife at a little over 7 months pregnant.  The due date is February 29th- a leap year baby!

   A year after I took the daguerreotype workshop at the George Eastman House, I am about a month away from creating  double sensitized mercurial daguerreotypes suitable for portaiture.   I have loaded some Iodine into one of the boxes and it seems to work very well.

It is sitting in my fume hood slowly warming to room temperature so I can try a few becquerel dags hopefully on Wednesday.    The other fuming box should work just fine with the bromine charged silica gel so the boxes seem to be ready to go.    The mercury is on its way and it will probably show up tomorrow.   The bromine proved to be the hardest to get but I have secured 500ml of the vile red liquid- It arrives in about a month or so.

Today I made a new home for the buffing wheel so that is now checked off the list.

There are a few more things left to do like finishing the buffing paddles and setting up a small fume cupboard for the sensitizing boxes in the dark area.    Thanks to Laurel Schultz I have the Iodine, a buffer and wheels, abrasives, velvet for the buffing paddles and  some plates that simply need to be polished and sensitized.    She really gave me the boost that I needed and I will be forever grateful for all her help.

Here is a little mention in Seattle Magazine.  It put a big smile on my face when I read it and I have  to thank Hayley Young (Seattle Magazine staff phorographer) and
Sue Boylan( Seattle Magazine Art Director) for this.   I suspect they had something to do with this.

Most Beloved Local Photographer: Daniel Carrillo

Our favorite Seattle photographer doesn’t use the latest technology. His photos aren’t the crispest, or cleanest, or most colorful. But that’s exactly what makes his portraits so appealing. For the past two years, Daniel Carrillo has been documenting Seattle’s artistic community via gorgeous portraits taken using the “wet plate collodion” method, which was invented in 1850 and involves a giant, accordion-style camera, glass plates and extremely slow exposures. And while Carrillo (who has also shot portraits for Seattle magazine features) is hooked on this old-school approach, he doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge the new-school way his work gained acclaim: on Facebook.

I was invited to join a group of fantastic photographers at the home of Laurel Schultz, a very talented Seattle sculptor/photographer.  She gave an impromptu workshop on the Becquerel method of creating daguerreotypes.  The process uses no mercury to develop the plate and no bromine to speed up the sensitivity and is considered safer and less toxic as it only requires elemental iodine to create and image.  The plate is developed by covering the plate with rubylith and exposing the covered plate to bright light.  The latent image appears slowly over a period of a few hours.  The sensitivity is extremely low and requires extremely long exposures making it impractical for some subjects.

This was a two day adventure and on the first day we prepared the plates by polishing the plates, buffing them and then sensitizing using only iodine.  The plate was then loaded into a holder and exposed.  The day was dark  and overcast so my exposure was at about 1hr at an EV of 6 with the lens wide open at F/4.  After the exposure we all built small cardboard holders with the rubylith covering the exposed plates and then they were all exposed to a 100 watt floodlight for a few hours.

The next day, some plates were better exposed than others and I lucked out and got a pretty strong image.  The plates were taken out of the enclosures and then gilt with gold chloride.

Laurel even had some glass and archival tape to make enclosures.   The whole experience was just more confirmation that making daguerreotypes is  something that feel compelled to do.  I  have been waiting around until I could get some bromine(the hardest chemical to acquire)but I think I will continue to make the becquerel dags in order to get into the swing of it and a feel for preparing plates.  Ultimately, I will be  using bromine.  I can get some iodine and mercury with no problem so I am not sure what I was waiting for.  I can simply develop the iodine only daguerreotypes with mercury (in a fume hood of course)until I get the bromine.  Until then I will get to collecting all the necessary tools to make more daguerreotypes on my own.

Here is the final image.  It is a 1/4 plate(3.25 x 4.25 inches)

check out this video of my work by the folks at [FRAMED]

I will be showing at Skagit Valley College through October.  There will about 25-30 ambrotypes as well as one of my daguerreotypes from the workshop at the Eastman House.  A demonstration of the wet plate process is scheduled as well.   If you would like to see the work and or want to attend the demo please contact Ellen Micheal at Skagit County College.

October 6 - November 12, 2011 Mars vs Venus: Images of Male and Female

My portait of Kiki Smith will be included in the this upcoming show at Greg Kucera Gallery.

Brian Miller from the Seattle Weekly stopped by to sit in on a portrait sitting with Joey Bates.  Here is the write up.

     I am currently trying to get my new space up and running.  Since I am almost done with my residency, I need to  get my butt in gear.  There is a new sink installed and I just scored this sweeeeeeet fume hood so I can mix the nasties without inhaling dangerous fumes.  It will also serve to vent out the mercury and halogen fumes whenever I get around to making daguerreotypes.

In the new space, I will begin making more collodion negatives and hope to print some salt and albumen prints.  I also have n 8 x 10 cold light head and plan on building a horizontal enlarger to enlarge some of my older plates that can only be printed on modern paper.

I was asked to shoot some portraits for the upcoming  edition of Seattle Magazine.  They are featuring a few well known local brewers in town and they figured that they would be really interesting to have them shot in collodion.

here are the best images from the shoot-

Charlie and Rose Ann Finkel

Kevin Forhan

Bill Jenkins, Dick Cantwell, and Jason Parker

Skip Madsen

Drew Cluley-  This shot was taken with a 12 inch lens at f11 for 24 seconds!  Used a head brace of course…

– Here is a bonus shot of Drew

Got a call around 3pm. yesterday from Mathew Richter.  He was invited to talk about the Storefront Project  he is managing on a local daytime magazine show call New Day Northwest starring Margaret Larson. They needed an artist to show some work and talk about what they are doing in their assigned space.  I said yes and the next day I was on the set with  Mat awaiting out turn to go on.  Right before we went on, we they powdered our faces to keep us from being too shiny :0)

I am going to be a daddy!  Baby is due in late February.

!

Thanks to the Seattle Storefronts Project, I have been using the cavernous back portion of  an empty storefront in the Pioneer Square district of downtown Seattle.  The space is shared with Youth In Focus, a non-profit organization that provides free photography classes to disadvantaged youth.  They have the front and I have the back.  The back space is huge and it is a real treat to have so much room to shoot.

Here is a little tour-

I recently hosted a First Thursday to my co-worker D.W Burnam and he put together a show featuring his New Yorker friend Anthony Vitale, Brad Winchester and some of his own rarely seen work.  Next First Thursday will be curated by Miss Sierra Stinson who puts on shows called Vignettes in her modest apartment every two weeks.

I will continue to use the space through October.  The timing for this residency couldn’t have been at a better time.  Last month I secured my own workspace.  It is just and empty room but hopefully I will have  my newly acquired studio in Georgetown ready to go so my move will be seamless.

Deborah Butterfield is an american sculptor who creates life size horses from found materials and cast bronze tree branches and limbs.  The Large horses are one solid piece of bronze and are painted so the wood looks very natural.  I have seen these horses being installed at the gallery and they are extremely heavy.  I had the opportunity to photograph Deborah at her opening at Greg Kucera and I set up behind the gallery with my “portable” darkroom setup.

Here is the one shot of Deborah.  It is an 11 x 14 collodion negative scan.  I will be printing the negative later.

f4.5 for 4 seconds

So I have built a wet plate back for the 8 x 10 Century master studio camera.

I learned a lot on that project and set out to make a back for my Deardorff 11 x 14.  The camera came with a spring back so I wanted to use this back as the focusing back instead of making a separate focusing back for the new plate holder.  Other than being much bigger, the project went pretty smoothly and the back works very well.  The one thing that needs to change is the galvanized darkslide really reacts with any silver nitrate that comes in contact with it.  The mild steel on my century back reacts less and works much better.  I will change that out soon enough.   I made plexiglass reducing inserts for 8 x 10 and 5 x 7.