How to make a kallitype (part 1) ...
There was an interesting discussion on APUG about kallitypes and how they look like when exposed but not yet developed. So I promised to show an image of an undeveloped kallitype. Since I anyway wanted to print the dung fork again for a friend and since I had my digi gizmo with me in the darkroom anyway I decided to show here how to do a kallitype step-by-step.
Since all this might get a little bit lengthy I will break this up into multiple posts.
So let us start with the coating setup. We need the emulsion, the paper and some brushes. All that is shown on the left. You see the coating area which is just a piece of glass (because it is easy to clean once you get some emulsion on it). There are two brushes, more about them later. And you can see a sheet of paper and an old negative which I use to mark the coating area.
I mark the coating area with a pencil and the marks are removed later with an eraser. In addition to that we need a small beaker which we use to mix the emulsion in and of course the two bottles which contain the silver nitrate and the ferrous oxalate.
Furthermore we need a place to let the coated paper dry. I just use an empty box of photo paper.
Now, if everything is ready we can start to mix the emulsion. We take equal parts of both solutions and mix it in the beaker. I take 1 ml of each which is enough to coat paper for four 4×5 negatives.
I do the coating with a brush. I like this more and it is somehow easier to do compared to using a coating rod.
You take some emulsion on the brush an then coat the paper in the marked area. you first work from left to right and then from top to bottom so that the emulsion is spread evenly. Once the emulsion starts to dry you should stop.
Now take the other brush which is made out of badger hair and with light circling strokes remove the brush marks in the emulsion. Then put the coated paper into the drying box so that it can dry in darkness.
OK, once you coated all the prepared sheets you will have to wait until the coated paper is bone dry. That is the right time to clean the beaker and the brushes. Did I mention that you do not want any of the solution making it on your skin or into your eyes?
Making a Kallitype (part 2) ...
OK, in the last post we cleaned beaker and brushes. Now the coated paper should be dry. Now let's prepare the contact printing frame. Because of possible reflection I put a sheet of black paper under the negative/paper sandwich.
And since everything is a bit improvised I saved the cost of a good contact printing frame and just use a normal frame. But at least it is a very practical one which can be loaded bottom up instead of top down as with usual frames.
Next is to choose a negative to print. Maybe that is not too obvious on the image on the right, the negative should have a good amount of contrast, maybe one that would normally print with grade 0 or grade 1. I use a tanning developer to develop my 4×5 film. It is Tanol from Wolfgang Moersch. It turned out that the tan produces negatives which are very well printable at grade 2 or 3 but at the same time the tan blocks UV light very well, so that the same negative is suitable for kallitype printing. So here is the negative of the dung fork.
So here is the coated paper in the drying box. The paper is now dry so we can do our print. But wait, letŐs do a test print first. I coated one with the rest of emulsion I had after coating the four sheets of paper.
On the right you see the sandwich of negative and test strip. This will now be exposed. I go for 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and 4 minutes exposure. You may want to have finer intervals, but I know the negative already.
On the left you see my setup to expose the test strip. I use (improvised, improvised) a facial tanner, well maybe a little bit bigger than that. At least it is OK to do up to 8×10".
On the right you see the exposed test strip sandwich, still in the contact frame. One side which only got 30 seconds exposure shows nearly no darkening, the side which got the four minutes might have too much. Development and dry down will prove.
On the left you can see how the exposed test strip looks like. For a kallitype, the exposed image should show some orange tones in the deepest shadows, the mid tones will be barely recognizable and the light tones will just look like ... emulsion.
Since you will see the whole procedure once once we do the print, I save the space and do not show the develop, clean and fix phases for the test strip. All you can see on the right is the finished and dry test strip. And the strip looks like the 2 minutes exposure is it.
In the next part I will show you how the print is done. Stay tuned.
Making a Kallitype (part 3) ...
So, this is the third in a series of three posts about making a kallitype print. In the last two parts I showed the setup and the test strip, today I will go for the final print.
So on the left is the coated and dry paper. The marks of the coating area are removed with an eraser.
The negative is placed emulsion side to emulsion side on the coated paper and any dust is removed. I use a blower for this. Then the glass is put on that sandwich and the printing frame is ready for exposure.
Now the paper is exposed for the time we found out to be right with the test strip. Two minutes in this case. After the exposure we remove the paper from the printing frame and on the right you can see how it should look like. Not very nice so far. You can see the deepest shadows as a slight orange, the mid tones do not show yet. Now put it into a dry tray and we go on to develop it
Now pour in the developer so that the image is covered with developer fast, that will help with even development. The image shows up instantly but is not developed out right now. That needs another few minutes. What you might realize is some of the emulsion swim of. That is not a problem.
On the left you see the image after the development (which takes around five minutes). Next is a short wash and then it goes into the clearing bath. I use one tray development for kallitypes which I find is better for the paper since it has not to be touched by your fingers or by tongues during the process. The fist time I have to touch it again is when moving it over into the final wash. So the image stays for another five minutes in the clearing bath. Remember, all those baths are not recreational baths where the paper just gets a rest, you have to agitate the tray almost permanently. In the clearing bath the image might fade a bit. On the right side you can see how the image will look like after the clearing bath.
After the clearing bath we go for another short wash and now is the time that you usually would tone the image with some higher metal toning baths as platinum, palladium or gold. These toners make the image more permanent and also change them in tone. Well since all the silver is exchanged with the higher metal that means that what you have afterwards is more a platinum, palladium or gold print. But these metals have a big disadvantage - they are pretty expensive. So better you like the kallitypes untoned, that is going to save you a lot of money. I started with kallitypes because I did not want to waste that much money while trying to get paper coated evenly etc. But I think I will stick with kallitypes because I just like how they look like.
But back to the dung fork kallitype. What you see on the left is the image after being in an alkalic fixing bath for four minutes. You see that the image tone has changed again. Now after the fixing bath I wash for a short time and then put the image into an hypo clearing bath for some minutes and then it goes to the final wash. You can see how it comes out of the wash on the right.
So now after the final wash it is time for the image to take a rest. I put it face up on drying screens and let it sleep over night. Still wet the image still does not show any very deep blacks. You will let the dry down effect do its work over night and be surprised the next morning.
Now, since I wanted to finish this series I decided not to wait the whole night to get the print into its final state. So instead of air dried I hair dried it. It does not take a long time to get it dry that way and this is also a good method to watch dry down and a few minutes later you have the finished kallitype in front of you. Here it is on the right, the finished Dung Fork, ready to be sent to my friend.
Now I have to decide if I do this as a normal postcard and just write on the back, or if I treat it as artwork and put it in an envelope.
Oh btw. did you know, today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. I have my negatives ready for development. So I leave now for the darkroom. Take care!
Week 17: D-4305 (WPPD) ...
So here it is, my contribution to WPPD 2010. My daughter and my mother did a sightseeing flight today and the rest of the family waited at the small airport. I used the time to take some images of the gliders there. Here is the one I like most - D-4305.
Doing the Real Thing ...
I did some lith prints of some images you already know as kallitypes, so it is some old friends showing up again. You can see them here in this post. But this post is not about these images, it is more about something I thought about when spending the usual 8 minutes development time per print.
Every once in a while, when talking to other photographers or when sharing prints, somebody tries to challenge me with comments like - why do you still use film when digital is so much easier and cheaper and better? Or - Can't you achieve this lith look not also by using Photoshop? Or - why do you still use a darkroom and prefer the smell of the chemicals when you could instead sit in front of the computer in day light?
To answer the usual better, cheaper and easier question is an easy one:
- Better? I like what I can get out of the darkroom and I do not care about something else being better or somebody else thinking something else being better.
- Cheaper? I already save a lot of money by not buying a new DSLR every two or three years. And prints (inkjet or lightjet) done on a paper cost more than what a print in the darkroom costs. And yes sometimes digital images look cheap. No! That was not me writing that last sentence. Just ignore it.
- Easier? Well, probably, but what I learned from life is: to get some satisfaction, let the others do the easy things.
Well, but that is not it. The real argument - my real argument - is a different one. And it is a very simple one:
I could sit in front of a computer to handle my imagery, but I already sit in front of a computer monitor the whole day to earn my living. Why should I sit in front of a computer monitor in my free time? That usually stops any more arguing. Even if it is not true, because partly I spent free time in front of a computer to scan my prints and show them here or to keep contact to people I know via the internet and only the internet.
But there is more to it than just that. And not that simple.
It is also a question about what you want to do and how real that should be. To me a digital image on the hard disk or shown on the computer monitor is not real. I have to have a print in hand. And even then ...
Let's come back to the digital lith print question which I often hear after describing the process: Can't you do these lith prints not much easier in Photoshop? I can not and nobody can. You can not do a lith print in Photoshop - or to be a bit more specific about what I mean, you can not do a real lith print in Photoshop. What you can do in Photoshop is something which looks like a real lith print, but that is all it is - something which looks like a real lith print.
In the eyes of the viewer one may look exactly like the other. Not a big deal for the consumer (you, if you are not in the lith print business), but a big difference for the producer (me). So the question why I do not use Photoshop to produce images which look like lith prints simplifies to the following: Do I want to produce the real thing or something which just looks like the real thing? I decided for the real thing. And as I already mentioned in an earlier post, this decision has nothing to do with the one method being better than the other (I do not know which is) or the one is easier than the other (I do not care which is) or the one produces prettier results (wasn't the assumption that they may look the same).
This decision is only based on me wanting to do the real thing and not the virtual. Would I be in winery, I would like to produce wine the traditional way and not using a laboratory. There are many other examples out there.
So now we know that I prefer to do real lith prints and I want to make sure that in no way I want to influence you. If you are able to produce digital b&w photographs which look like real lith prints - good so, congratulations, because even if I would like, my Photoshop skills do not allow me to do so. Who knows, maybe my preference for one method is influenced by my incapability in the other method.
And the essence of all this babbling: If we ever meet in person, please do not ask why I do not use Photoshop to produce lith prints.
Oh, did I mention that all this also applies to kallitypes and other processes as well?
PS: And then there is a totally different reason why I prefer darkroom prints over inkjet or lightjet prints, but that is a story for one of the next posts.
Week 18: Bad Urach ...
This weekend I was at a gathering of some members of a German Nikon internet forum (Nikon Fotografie Forum) in Bad Urach. I had my little Zero2000 with me and a small Jobi Gorillapod. Although it is not easy to do some pinhole photographs when out with a bigger group (usually these meetings are more to meet the people and not to do serious photography) I tried some pinholes. The image you see here is probably kind of interesting as I fixed the gorillapod at the door handle. So whenever somebody entered the room the camera moved with the door, keeping the door in "sharpness" and leading to some double or better multi exposures for the rest of the image. I find this kind of funny. Maybe you too.
I also tried some new paper (well, new is probably the wrong word for the paper since it is a very old one). I had the problem to show some of my images to that group of people without too much delay. But I do not want to scan film and I was also not in the mood to do normal prints on RC paper (which get dry pretty fast). Well, rarely I am in the mood of doing normal prints. So fiber based paper was not a choice for the task but then I remembered that when I bought my 5×7 enlarger that guy gave me some Classic Arts paper called polywarmtone RC. Polywarmtone, that sounds like the Forte emulsion and I knew - it will lith print. So I gave it a try and it worked. What a pitty that this paper is not produced anymore. But probably Adox will give it a rebirth: Forte Polywarmtone Rebirth.
Week 19: Amadus Church, Bad Urach ...
This is another image from the outing in Bad Urach. It shows a detail of Amadus Church in Bad Urach. One stop more light would have been great, but being out with a group of people you have to be careful to not let your exposures be too long, so do not expect the same patience as yours from others running in 1/250 second cycles.
This weeks side print shows a hall in Bad Urach palace. Also a lith print.