After my session in the darkroom I wanted to experiment with some Iron Blue toning. (See my
previous post for details.) Wolfgang Moersh's work inspired me to take a further look.
I brought out his
MT7 Iron Blue toning kit and mixed some fresh chemistry. On his photos on Flickr he gives some of his recipes. The one I used was 2+2+5+2 with 500ml of water. In his system the numbers are milliliters of Part 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.
I decided to use the 8x10 prints to experiment with. These are all printed on Kentmere VC Select RC paper. The chemicals are mixed with the water and I poured about half into the tray to cover my first print. This was a print I had made with suspected expired developer but was probably OK. I let it run for about 3 minutes in the toner. I would let the toner wash over the print and prop up the tray to let it drain. This lets me assess the degree of color change. The next I did for 2 minutes though it was a darker print and finally for 1 minute for a moderately dark print. They are shown below with exposure and toning times give.
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| f16 #5 22 sec #0 11 sec Old Dev MT7 3 min |
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| f16 #5 64 sec #0 4 sec Old Dev MT7 2 min |
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| f16 #5 45 sec #0 4 sec Old Dev MT7 1 min |
So you can achieve a rang of colors with toning from very blue to just moving to a cooler tone of the image in the last one. In many ways the dark center one is my favorite.
Next I toned the images from the previous blog post. This allows more direct comparisons of the effects on color. I show these in pairs pre and post toning in the same order as the previous blog post. These are in decreasing order of toning length.
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| f16 #5 32 sec #0 8 sec 3 Minute Toning |
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| f16 #5 38 sec #0 4 sec 2 Minute Toning |
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| f16 #5 16 sec #0 16 sec 1 Minute Toning |
Finally probably the most compelling result was from the print I bleached then selenium toned. This started out with a soft almost peach warm tone. Below I have the comparison again. The print retains the soft warm tones in the highlights with the shadows picking up most of the blue.
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| f16 #5 0 sec #0 32 sec bleach selenium 1+3 MT7 4 min Comparison |
Finally the instruction for the MT7 kit mentions the use of an Ammonia bath to knock back blue colors that are too strong. I mixed about 4ml of the 10% Ammonia solution supplied with 1 liter of water to make the bath. I dropped in the bluest image which is the first in this post and let it sit for about a minute. I got a much more neutral color. See comparison before and after below. I don not know the source of the brown spots. They look like some contamination of some kind while drying.
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| f16 #5 22 sec #0 11 sec Old Dev MT7 3 min Ammonia Bath |
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