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...

I decided to try and make some small improvements based on my project print in the previous post in this series. I had a second lith print of the same type as before. The lith development proceeded slightly further on this one making it slightly darker.  Source lith print This one I applied selenium toner on the forest floor though this time with a swab of cotton rather than the riskier soaking. The 1+3 concentration means it does not take much or long for the toner to work.  I then sepia toned the darker left and right sides about 3 minutes before giving an overall sepia tone for about a minute. The resulted in warmer tones on the sides and a neutral tone in the center.  Selenium and sepia toned version This sets the stage for iron toning.  Added Iron Toner Here is the iron toned version. The sepia toned sides still retain their warmth this time. Not too interesting. I am hoping ammonia fogging will spruce it up a bit.  Ammonia fuming This helped moderate the c...

I followed through on my earlier post to reprint the Fohar images using shorter exposure times to probe the lower limit of lith printing on this paper. I took my Ev (@ISO 100) of about 3 reading in the highlights at f11 which was less than I had exposed most of the prints for yesterday. For today's images I have normalized all the exposures to f11 and the intervals are all one stop difference.  When developing I used yesterday's developer without fortifying it and only heated it in the microwave for half the usual 3-minute interval (1:30). This lengthened the development time to 2+ minutes compared to the over-heated developer I used yesterday which would be done in 30 seconds or less.  I aimed for the infectious development to just get started in the nearest trees rather than blacken all the trees. This is an aesthetic choice different from most of the images I made yesterday. This makes the prints look almost like normally developed prints with detail in many of the shadows...

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.  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 the...

Introduction to Iron Blue Toning I got a few acceptable prints from the Wye forest printing session. I decided to try some blue toning. I have found that blue toning works well in foggy forest scenes.   I use the Moersch MT4 Iron Blue toning kit. The kit is simple in that it has 4 parts that you mix with distilled water. There is also a clearing solution to mix. I mix all this as single use. I tend to make 500ml for 8x10 prints which works well in small trays. The toner doesn’t last long about an hour or two.  I always start with my old test prints to establish tone and timing. Blue toner changes color under different conditions. With denser/darker images the blue is less apparent and more cyan in lighter toned images. Length of time in the toning solution also effects the tone as more silver takes up iron. There is a sharp break for instance between 30 seconds and 60 seconds. 30 seconds delivers an understated dark blue tone while 60 seconds is much stronger.  You can a...

 This is the final print in the series that starts here (yes strangely at no2 print).  This is yet another soft image from a foggy day which provided a challenge to print. Because the negatives are so thin in this series being HP5+ pushed to ISO 800 I opted to intensify this one by soaking it in Selenium 1+3 toner for about 5 minutes. This usually helps bring up density and particularly increases contrast. (I first did this here and Andrew Sanderson has a good blogpost on intensification here .) Never-the-less the better prints were made with little to no soft filter.  Original negative left Intensified right (slightly darker) These small trees were on the edge of a road cut about eye level. The light streamlining through the gap in the trees on the left lit them with a soft light. The short depth of field was forced because of the low light and being handheld. Most of the images I took that day were in the range of 1/30 to 1/60 second and f4 to f8. In the end the print...

Another in this short series on printing some images shot in the Wye valley. A foggy day and a wide open lens led to some very soft images that have a different look than I am accustomed to.  This image is one where what I visualized was not what ended up on the negative. I saw this glimpse of light in the depth of the forest and the outline of some trees there. However as is often the case in forests there is a strong light from the bright, though foggy, sky. This lit up some of the red cedar boughs in the upper right and the ferns in the foreground.  In order to recover what I was seeing at the time from the negative I must do some creative burning to keep the eye focused on the central subject. These prints I made on RC paper Ilford MGIV RC. I didn't think the image was very promising and I have a small stack of the RC paper I haven't touched in some while. Here is the first print after test strips.   ...