MorseBlog

This is another print from the visit to the Wye valley on the English-Welsh border. I first printed this as a conventional print on Ilford RC paper back in 2021. Through the vagaries of Flickr it garnered the most views and second most 'likes' of anything I have posted. (I don't chase likes, views, or explores on Flickr.) I don't know why but it perhaps has to do with not seeming too digital though I also think the dark mood was part of the appeal. This and other similar prints' success have encouraged me to explore the darkness more.  And so, I return to this to see if I can work any lith magic on this image. The original print took some wrestling to get it into the final form. I had to suppress the brightness especially in the upper part of the image in order to achieve the vision of peering into a secret in the deep forest. This turned out to be simpler with lith. I started with a simple straight exposure. I metered the light part of the scene in the center and...

Increasingly I find that lith printing is not an end to itself but a component of creating the final image. These images I have created lately starting with lith printing I think of as being archetypal or perhaps liminal images, if I understand the terms. I plan to discuss these emergent ideas in a later post. I am gaining a better understanding of the process of lith printing and toning and can now direct the activity a little more. I would not think of mastery as it seems to be an unachievable objective and probably would destroy the process if it were achieved. For to master a process steeped in randomness or serendipity would be to thwart the power of the process to create what wasn't imagined before. From my earlier post in this series, I chose a few images to work with. I wanted to use one from the Oriental Seagull paper and one from the Fohar Raster paper. I would tone them differently in different areas.  I wanted to try the sepia toning o...

I continue on this journey today with some more experiments. First, I am still trying to extract warmer tones with Fish and Chips being part of this process. Fish and Chips is a rehalating bleach based on potassium permanganate as the bleach agent and the use of sodium chloride as the source of the halogen rather than the traditional potassium bromide.  The impetus was to be able to develop and tone silver chloride in the bleached areas. The trouble is my only source of warm tone developer is the lith developer EasyLith. Today I recalled that I have some old Ilford Universal PQ developer that I stopped using as I don't like the warmish tone it delivers. The trouble is that Universal PQ is formulated with both KBr (Potassium Bromide) and BZT (Benzotriazole) as a restrainer. BZT delivers a cool tone while KBr contributes warmer tones.  I took some test prints from the prior session that had been developed in Moersch ECO 4812 developer to get a neutral to cold tone print. I the...

A private theory of mine is that the Impressionist artists got some of their ideas from the emerging technology of photography. My insight, if one could call it that, was spotting dust off of black and white negatives of my brother's to be included in a book I was making of his work. When you work that closely on an image you can see how the image is built up out of different shaped grains of silver of differing density and size. A photo that conveys a clear and focused image of a familiar object is composed of pieces that are nowhere nearly so sharp or definite when examined closely.  To me this is similar to what the impressionist did with a paint brush. Not interested in marking shapes and shades in sharp well drafted lines they are made with strokes, brushes, or points of color and shade. Anyway, that is my theory, I have no other way to defend it.  This led me to think that I could make images that were intentionally very grainy. That led me to think I should try landscap...