MorseBlog

Following Wolfgang Moersch on Flicker he has some great lith prints of fall leaves. I believe from his comments he placed them in the enlarger and printed them directly. These are truly nice prints and show what an artist he is. I decided to give it try (without Lith as it takes so much longer). I think Wolfgang has a 4x5 enlarger as he has some large tree leaves in his print set. I can only go to 6x6 so I must go for smaller leaves. I picked a random leaf that might be interesting. I put it in the film holder ... Then the usual test strips... Test Strip at f8 #00 Filter The first at f8 was overexposed. So I moved to f16. Test Strip at f16 #00 Filter the exposure at 64 seconds seemed best. So I opened it up to f11 and exposed at 32". Leaf Print f11 #00 32 sec Lots of detail and with the lowest contrast filter. (Ilford MGIV Deluxe RC Pearl). So I thought that this looks like a negative image and I would like to get a positive.I used the above print as a paper i...

I bough this paper a while back and tried it out as part of my exploration of old photo papers. USSR UniBrom Packaging I ran a test strip as follows. Unibrom f8 test strip I developed as follows... 2 minute Ilford Universal PQ (1+9) 20 seconds stop 5 minute Ilford Rapid Fix (1+9) 30 minute wash Already it looks low contrast. So I tried exposures at 32 seconds and 64 seconds at f8. Unibrom f8 32sec Unibrom f8 64sec As suspected not very high contrast. So later I thought I would try out some Lith developer to see if I could get some better contrast from the paper as I did with the Agfa Lupex in the previous post. So first a test strip using Moersch EasyLith developer. EasyLith Unibom Test Strip Hmm this was a mess. It developed very slowly at first. As with the Agfa Lupex I cut the test paper into partial strips after exposure so I could develop them individually. Suddenly the strips wnte from barely gray to very dark edges where I had cut the paper. T...

When I looked at Agfa Lupex, an old German paper, in a previous post (see More German Paper ) I complained about the contrast of the exposure. In reading about Lith printing in articles by Tom Rudman and Wolfgang Moersh I saw the opportunity to perhaps enhance the contrast. Lith printing works by overexposing the paper then using a dilute lith developer that takes some time to develop. Rather than 'develop to completion' with a proper exposure of the paper as in conventional printing, Lith printing depends on the snatch time (time in the Lith developer) to decide final image darkness. The dilute developer helps as the development is extended to several minutes. Lith however depends on the concept of infectious development which only a few papers (if any today) possess. In this process the highlights stay relatively fixed regardless of development time but the dark areas build rapidly after some time. By judging the snatch time it is possible to play with contrast which is w...