Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

When the Spiker, Jeff the photographer and DoN arrived in Anne Saint Peter‘s studio on our open studio tour at 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, the collection of unusual photographic prints glowing in the afternoon sun fascinated our art crawling trio.  Jeff the photographer shoots with a beautiful Nikon camera, DoN has his trusty Kodak and iPhone for Instagramming, and the Spike-man uses his iPhone camera to document his life through photography.  So, when the photo-geeks saw Anne Saint Peter‘s studio there were a lot of questions to ask about photography.

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud 

DoN asked Anne Saint Peter about the process of printing images on metal?  “I was looking to do panoramic photography, I wanted a panoramic camera but they were tremendously expensive because of the lens to do that, so I figured out how to do it by using multiple exposures.  And then I was looking for an interesting alternative to inkjets and I found that some people were printing on aluminum and I thought,’That’s sound cool.”  But how does that work?

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

“It has to have a special coating, the aluminum, in this case it’s roofing material, you have to clean it it, basically scrub it down.  You coat it and things working out well it goes evenly.  Actually the Epson ink-jets are really good with this type of thing.  They can even take cardboard. So, it’s an interesting thing.  The bottom ones I got commercially printed because their starting to do it commercially, wedding photographers like it because of the reflective quality.  But they’re doing full color photographs and full color photographs done like that on aluminum pop.  But if I send them these files they turn out totally differently.”

“I don’t like coating aluminum, it seems kind of a waste of why you’re doing it.  They also make what they call metallic paper which gives you some of that pop but the problem with me is that when you cover it with glass you sort of lose it, like what’s the point?  I’m trying to figure out how to show it without glass.”

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden

The trio of photo geeks were fascinated with the box camera set up in the studio.  Anne Saint Peter said, “It’s an eight by ten, the glass plates are under here.  You just slide them in and open this up (remove the lens cover) and you’re good to go.  This is actually such a small lens, in terms of aperture, you have plenty of time, it takes longer so it works out really well.  The problem is the focussing and things like that because the image that you see on here is upside down and reversed.  So, it’s interesting, I can’t tell if people are smiling or not.  You know, like if you’re doing a portrait and it’s a little hard, if somebody moves you’re out of the pool.”

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

Anne Saint Peter continued, “But when you get it, people who are good at, I’m just not, I don’t do it enough, I can do a smaller one, 4 x 5.”  DoN asked if the camera uses glass plates?  “No, I use film.  You can use the glass plates but then the glass plates have to be coated and processed within a couple minutes, finished in a couple minutes. And that’s, I love the images, but it’s too much to try and control. And what killed me in the end is they were coating them with shellac and alcohol over a flame. And I was out of the pool right there. Shellac sticks to everything, everything’s stuck to your hand, how do you get it even?  The answer is you just practice. Over an open flame which could start a fire any minute with glass that’s going to break. No. To me printing with inkjet on aluminum is a lot easier”

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer except where noted.

Thank you to contributing photographer Jeff Stroud.