Revisiting Wye Valley Forest: Inspiration Can Arrive from Anywhere...
The inspiration for this session in the darkroom came to me while I was sitting on the toilet early one morning before I was to take Mollie out on a walk. The house was otherwise asleep and quiet.
As I have shown previously my bathroom (toilet in the UK) is also my gallery for many of my smaller prints. There is one print I call ‘Ode to Wolfgang’* that was taken after the first lockdown in the Wye Valley on the border between England and Wales. It was nice to get out on a walk after lockdown on a moody foggy afternoon.
With the hall light on and the door closed to just a slit it cast an interesting light on the print on the wall and made me think there might be an alternative interpretation of the scene.
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| The Inspiration... |
I proceeded to make some Lith prints. I thought about making a normally developed print, but I have been enjoying the Lith printing process lately and have gotten some nice results, thus I decided to pursue this vein of creative energy. All of these were developed with Moersch EasyLith
I went with Oriental Seagull (G3) and my recent friend Fohar Raster paper. The first pass was to establish some basic prints in Oriental Seagull to work with. Towards this end I set up the easel for the 8x10" format and focused and composed the image. I measured the highlights and aimed for an Ev (ISO100) of 3 that I target as a starting point. This I then exposed for 32 seconds.
The first print was a straight 32 second print with no dodge or burn. I followed this with my intended interpretation where I burned each side of the image away from the center for an additional 32 seconds each. This I hoped would give me the lighted center portion I saw in my bathroom. I made some additional versions on this pass that I experimented with as well.
I then made a few test images with toning on some of the images. Here are the first pass results...
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| f8 32 sec Sepia/Sulfur toned Oriental Seagull |
The straight Lith print works well. The blackness of the tree trunks emphasizes the depths of tone elsewhere in the image. This one I sepia toned and got a surprising though pleasant light lavender tone.
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| f8 32 sec 32 sec burn left, 32 sec burn right untoned Oriental Seagull |
The next two images I held back development to almost no infectious development. The result is a low contrast print with lots of the tonality from the lith process.
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| f5.6 32 sec untoned Oriental Seagull |
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| f11 32 sec Nelson Gold Toner + Selenium 1+3 Oriental Seagull |
This print was like the one above it before I toned it. You can just see the start of infectious development in some areas, however. There is not much difference in these prints despite the 2 stop difference in exposure. This is because the exposure most strongly affects the infectious development and the ratio of highlights to blacks. Since I pulled them before infectious development, they end up being similar.
I tried Nelson Gold Toner and after about 2 1/2 minutes it went from the warm lith tones to a neutral gray tone. I was hoping for a slightly blue color and some increased contrast in the mid-tones. The blue never materialized but there may have been some improvement in contrast. I didn't like the gray tones so I decided to see what would happen with heavy selenium toning (1+3 concentration). I did not expect much depending on how much gold toning had converted the silver. However the short gold toning apparently left lots of silver for the selenium to act on. The image went from a warm brown to this slightly redder tone by the time I pulled it out. The contrast did improve with these toning treatments.
After this first batch of prints I decided on a second session to include Oriental Seagull and Fohar papers. I wanted some more versions of the first sessions prints to play with toning some more before I moved onto the Fohar prints.
I overheated the developer (more than I normally do) and the prints developed very rapidly, well inside a minute. This made the judgement and consistency of the snatch point worse.
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| f8 32 sec 32 sec burn left, 32 sec burn right untoned Oriental Seagull |
Again, one exposed exactly as the second image above. Note the infectious development almost got away from me resulting in a noticeable difference in the blacks.
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| f4 32 sec untoned Oriental Seagull |
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| f8 32 sec untoned Oriental Seagull |
Next was the Fohar Raster paper. It did not disappoint and showed good infectious development. It too was very fast in the too hot developer. Fohar tends to show less contrast, but I forgot to try lower exposures again to see about improving the contrast, I will try again tomorrow.
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| f4 32 sec untoned |
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| f8 32 sec untoned |
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| f4 32 sec 32 sec burn left, 32 sec burn right untoned |
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| f8 32 sec 32 sec burn left, 32 sec burn right untoned |
These last two show some of the serendipity in lith printing. I was juggling other prints in the stop and fixer baths while developing these. The result of the too hot fixer is that if some part of the paper is not immediately submerged there is not enough time for it to catch up to the development of other areas once infectious development sets in.
In the first of the last two images this resulted in a darker patch in the lower right corner area. This area got submerged first then the rest of the paper quickly followed. In the last image the bright spot in the upper right did not see developer until last. The resulted in a nice glint of light. Something that may be worth attempting to emulate again.
Here is a link to the next session where I probe the lower exposure limits of the Fohar paper.
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