Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt was born June 13, 1865, and died December 9th, 1932. Karl was a professor, a sculptor, an artist, and a photographer. As a self taught photographer many of his photos were taken with a homemade camera with the capability of magnifying its subjects up to thirty times its actual size. Not much is known about his hand made camera but what was known about his work was the printing which was a high-quality Photogravure printing process it wasn't the quality of his prints that made him famous but in which way the plant was shown. His work went on to be the base of his teachings, and what he did with Ironworks. His attention to detailed curving and his observations in organic forms allowed him to use his photographs as a teaching tool, this was the basis for a formal language of construction that could also be applied to objects and architecture.
That being said I tried digging around a little more on Karl Blossfeldt to try and figure out his camera and printing methods. Well not much was said about his actual homemade camera but that it had amazing abilities of "zooming in 30 times its actual size", that his subjects (plants) were placed in front of stark objects like a grey cupboard to avoid camera shake and that his homemade plate camera was equipped with very long bellows. The grey back ground makes sense so that the tonal range is flat thus giving all the attention to the subject with out having to light it in annoying positions and as for the bellows his camera had extra long one to achieve the 30 times zoom on the subject.
And as far as his printing methods Blossfeldt used a high quality process called Photogravure. Photogravure is a printing process where images are printed using forms of mechanised etching of plates. Which makes sense when talking about Blossfeldt's work his photographs had so much detail that you'd need a printing process that would have a wide variety of tones from depth of etch. It's the "wells" and "tooth" in the actual etching that give the varying depth to hold ink.
Researchers also say that Blossfeldt's work have tint of green to them. I've noticed too that most of the prints i've found online do have a greenish tint to them. I believe he did this for the effect of making his botanical collection of prints seem more organic and true to it's natural state because adding magenta would give a photo more contrast when printing photographs and not green.
From looking at his prints they are pretty consistent having the image pretty much smack dab in the center or if a plant had a curve in it he would place the subject so that it would have symmetry in the frame. Take Plate # 38: Polystichum munitum (magnified 6 times) the thick stem of the evergreen fern is placed to the left but balanced on the right by its tightly curled point. Plate # 55: Adiantum pedatum (magnified 8 times) another type of fern shown in this image works for me because it has sense of flow to it. and finally Plate # 58: Aristolochia clematitis (magnified 5 times) this is herbaceous plant almost looks like a baby bird, but I can see why with this image that Blossfeldt would use this as a teaching guide for architecture what's apparent in this image is the detail in structure of this plant.
