Solarplate printing, part 1

This is a print without ink from the first solarplate that I made in the class I am taking at the Lower East Side Printshop, which is not in the Lower East Side anymore. When I started thinking about what I wanted to print, I had to go back through all my photographs to find things that would work in stark black and white, since that was what we were going to be printing first. I gathered a bunch of photos and spent a couple of days transforming them into clear black and white, no gradient, sizing them and printing them on transparency film. This is how it printed once I inked it up.

We made the plates by exposing the Solarplates to the black and white transparencies in a lightbox. The timings are exacting, and the parameters are very precise, but it is fun to do. They say you can expose the plates in the sun, and I am going to HAVE to try that, but it seems fraught with issues doing it here. Using the sun makes the time for exposure up to 20 or 30 minutes, and the lightbox takes 1.5 minutes. Needless to say, I am figuring a way to rig up a light box, since I have a lot of the parts already from old grow-lights I used to grow plants when I first moved up north. Hmmmmmm............

I also tried another photo, and I like it, but not as much. I used a photo of skaters at Rockefeller Center.

I like it printed in red, but wish I had gone all the way and drawn on the photo to show the tops of the figures better.. but .. that is why this is called a learning process, right?