MorseBlog

After my recent experience with West German (Agfa) photo-paper from the 1950's I decided to try some paper from the Soviet Union from 1959. This was not initially out of interest in the Cold War but the insights were hard to ignore. The paper arrived from Lithuania in an un-opened package. The seller was kind enough to translate a  little for me. Photo-paper, unibrom especially glossy white cardboard contrasting N4 made in 1959   I presumed this to mean a Silver Bromide emulsion with a fairly high contrast assuming a numbering system similar to what we are used to in the West.    Photo paper packet. Armed with this I looked for a low contrast negative. After scanning, in Photoshop the negative looks like this. Original photo I then ran a test strip. The test strip got me about 8 seconds at f8 on my enlarger. I then exposed the Soviet paper at 8 seconds and developed as below...  2 minute Ilford Universal PQ (1+9) 20...

Last week on eBay I bought a packet of 1950's Agfa Bovira Bromide photographic paper. I bought it on a whim for cheap enough. The package having been opened and the paper being quite old I did not know what to expect. When it arrived  I opened it the darkroom and and found it was stored properly in its double envelope. There were perhaps 10 sheets of 3 1/2 x 4 1/2 paper along with a number of strips cut presumably to make test strips.   The back of the paper has this watermark. Watermark on back. It is actually quite faint and this was enhanced to see it better.  The first thing I did was take one strip out and develop and fix it to determine if the lot had been exposed to light and ruined. It developed not quite white but to a light pinkish tinge. This told me the paper was OK but perhaps fogged. It was processed as follows. 2 minute Ilford Universal PQ (1+9) 20 seconds stop 1 minute Ilford Rapid Fix (1+9) 2 minute wash Unexposed Paper Developed...

Introduction When Vicki and I had visited Anza-Borrego over the New Year we went hiking and I took a number of photographs. One I took of a Smoke tree I thought might look nice in Black and White. Original Velvia 100F Slide This is the Smoke Tree in color taken with a Mamiya C220 TLR using Velvia 100F slide film. The trees in this area looked distressed and lacked their normal pale dusty green color and were instead this yellow color. The difficulty with slide film in the enlarger of course is that the image will create a negative when printed. This means one must produce what is called an inter-negative. That is an intermediate image that is then reprinted (and reversed again) to create the final positive. There are two means normally used. 1) Film where a piece of black and white film is contact printed from the slide. This can then be developed and put in the enlarger and then printed directly. 2) a paper negative which is just a print of the slide at the same size as th...