MorseBlog

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...

I ran another Iron Blue toning experiment on my earlier lith prints. I normally mix this as 5+5+10+5 from the Moersch MT7 iron blue toning kit I use. The nomenclature means iron + bleach+stabilizer+acid. I mix 500ml batches for these 8x10 prints so the numbers are milliliters plus enough water to make 500ml.  The results in the past have been good but I wanted to keep the highlights clearer and in the case of the lith prints retain some of the original tone of the lith developer. The earlier versions had the lith tone almost completely subsumed by the blue tone.  Reading the documentation indicated the the strength of the acid could increase the rate of toning but also tone the highlights more. so I reasoned I should try less acid. It would at least give a little more time to decide when to pull the print. I mixed it as 5+5+10+2.  The result did improve on some of my objectives. The change of color was slower and proceeded more slowly through the highlights. I manage...

I set about making a study by re-photographing some trees in the fog. As part of this I decided as I often do to print some of these images. These negatives are a challenge as they lack any significant contrast. This project reinforced my belief that spending time on a challenging problem can lead to unexpected yet satisfying results. One has to be open to following where the process leads, dead-ends and all. The second installment in this series is here.. . Here is a summary of a many days long processes where I will cut to what I think are the best results. I have more detailed discussions of each stage here...(links may not be live immediately) Conventional Print Details Lith Print Details I started making conventional prints. My aim was to stick to a theme of ‘ma’. It is not possible keep the fog white and the trees dark. So I biased towards white fog. I managed a couple of versions in Ilford Art 300 paper and Ilford FB Classic. They are here... Ilford MG Art 300 Ilford MG FB Class...