Week 13: Lenswork ...
Lenswork is the only photographic magazine that I read regularly. And it is the best magazine about photography that I know of. Since my subscription started I collected 40 issues so far. And here you see all of them.
What I like about Lenswork is, that it is not about cameras, lenses and other equipment. It is about photographers and their art and about craft. The print quality can rival the print quality of every photographic book that I have seen. Give it a try, visit their web site, you won't regret it.
This image is done with the rsph810 on HP5+ which I developed in replenished XTOL. I then decided to use some paper I have still left, but do not usually use and probably will not buy again. Not because it is a bad paper, but because I do not want to stick with too many different papers and I like other papers more. It is contact printed on Fomabrom 112 using Wolfgang Moerschs SE2 Warmtone. I bleached the highlights a bit and did a sulfur toning.
There are no side prints this week. Well I could show a failure to redevelop this paper in lith. But I will show this probably in another post together with a redevelopment that looks better (but still has to be done).
Week 14: Where I Come From ...
To know your way through your life is as much knowing where you go to as it is knowing where you come from.
This is where I come from. A small village in palatinate forest enclosed by seven hills in the valley of Merzalb creek. This is a view over the village as seen through a window of castle Gräfenstein which is next to Merzalben on one of the hills.
I was there on Easter Monday (which is a public holiday in Germany). I hoped to have light overcast, but when I arrived at the castle the sun came out producing some hard contrasts. Usually you do not see too many people up there, but boy, it was crowded. There were some families with their kids seeking for easter eggs. And then there was this Dutch hiking group. I do not speak Dutch, but I love the sound of that language. Well, I assume I met around 50 people that morning.
What you see is a kallitype on Arches Platine paper, the lower left corner shows the shadow of the camera and the dark slide.
Week 15: Gräfenstein Castle ...
So here is another kallitype from Gräfenstein Castle. I did this while a grandpa standing behind the wall on the left was taking a photograph of his grandson standing behind the wall on the right. It took them my 16 seconds exposure time to manage this and I just took my chance.
Just a side note. This image has a different color than the kallitype of last week. That is because this one was put into my dry press at around 80°C for some time. That changes the appearance of the print and gives it a bit colder tone.
Week 16: Yucca (kallitype) ...
So once again the Yucca. Earlier in the year I participated in the APUG alt print exchange where people send around prints done with alternative printing methods, such as vdb, pt/pd, cyanotype, kallitype or what ever. I sent kallitypes of the Yucca negative which I did on Arches Platine. And - what a surprise - I also did one print for myself.
Now the next chapter of the story. The weekend before Easter I met with a few people in Colone, it was an APUG German gathering and a really nice meeting. We spent hours looking at beautiful photographs which the participants shared with each other. And obviously there was also some chatting about darkroom issues. Well, one of the guys I met there was Wolfgang Moersch, you know the wizard who makes these wonderful lith developer I mostly use. I was once in a kallitype printing workshop that he did and that gave me a go in alternative printing techniques. He is very responsive if you have questions (be it via email or via phone) and I used his expertise a lot. So I brought that kallitype as a gift for him.
Now back home again I realized "Hey, that was my last kallitype of that negative, now I have not a single copy for myself", so I printed that negative again and now that I printed it again, why not show it here on my little blog. Here it is, the Yucca again, this time as a kallitype. Hope you like that one too.
As a side note, I printed it twice, one with the normal sodium citrate developer, and one with the sodium citrate developer and 1 ml of sodium dichromate (not something you want to mix a drink out of it) to have a bit more contrast. And now I am in a dilemma (kind of), which one do I like more? Maybe a sign that non of the two is quite right. So today I am an I-like-contrast-guy and prefer the one developed in the dichromate developer. Maybe I will change my mind tomorrow.
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!