Double Vision

While making a print earlier my first test strip moved during the exposure of the test strip. In looking at it more I decided I liked it. The subject was the three trees from North Wales. 

Original print

The test strip is here below. 

Inspiration!

I decided to try this formally as an image. I considered how to shift the image. The shift in the test strip was from flattening the curl in the paper. This has the potential advantage having the two images pivot from the ground. I rejected this though as it seems harder to control and there will be a loss of focus. Still it is worth thinking about as the result may appear more like a shadow which could be useful.

I decided on a simple horizontal shift. Since the original print was almost entirely the full horizontal range of the negative I needed to create some space for the shift. I cropped the image in tighter to make room. Since it is a square image I lose some sky but I shifted the crop up to have less ground in the foreground. Now with the new composition I practiced sliding the easel along and looked for the right visual cues so I could work confidently in the dark. It was helpful to lay a small stick on the easel pointing to some reference on the projected image to judge the degree of shift. 

I re-used the original exposure though I technically should have increased the exposure a 1/4 stop or so. Since this was split filtered I decided to experiment with the shift occurring between soft and hard filters. For this scene it should result in lighter and darker versions. I also hoped that toning might be different between the two filter exposures. 

Exposure:

• 2xND
• 150w
• f11
• #00 22"
• #5 32"

I also wished to experiment with toning so I would try some of my recent Sepia toning in stages. I decided to take simple photos of the wet prints to judge the progress in 2 minutes toning intervals. I attempted to get more consistent smartphone photo results by photographing up against the wall on a very white plastic card. (This plastic verges towards blue when confronted with any slightly warm tone to my eye.) 

Sepia toning in minutes from upper left
0,  2,  4,
 6,  8,  10,
12, 14, 16

There was not any apparent separation in color between the hard and soft filter images. Basically you are left to chose how much warmth to add. 

Final Print

I like the look of this even in the strong sepia. There is just enough tone to make out the edges of the image (though not all of each edge). The separation between the double images is such that duplication is not immediately apparent and the lighter exposure that corresponds to the soft filter exposure gives a ghostly or foggy image. As usual I see a slight warming of the gelatin layer when I sepia tone. More washing often helps to return it closer to white.

Further Experiments

I wanted to explore a couple of things. First get a normally developed version back again and try Iron Blue Toning.  To this end I made 2 prints virtually identical to the one above. (As much as possible to reproduce the shift of the image.) I did bump the soft filter to a 1/4 stop higher exposure. 

Exposure:

• 2xND
• 150w
• f11
• #00 27"
• #5 32"

One I left in the neutral developer color and the other I toned blue. 

Next I noticed the above print had substantially more tree separation than the test strip that inspired me. I then made 3 more versions spaced first very closely (1/2 tree trunk separation) and the about the same distance further in the subsequent 2. I made the soft exposure first on each paper the shifted the hard exposure. I could sequence each of the three sheets in this way as I was going to be shifting the image and so registration wasn't the problem it normally in split filter printing. I made sure I marked each paper so I could get it loaded in the easel again in the right orientation. 

The three closer shift image I changed again the exposure slightly this time bringing the hard filter up by 1/4 stop. 

Exposure:

• 2xND
• 150w
• f11
• #00 27"
• #5 36"

Small Trouble

This printing session went well. However I had missed where the edge of the negative peeked through the edge of the easel and left a 1mm x 5mm black line in the upper right corner of every image. It was maddening more so as all 5 prints had the same fault as I had exposed them in a batch before development. 

I decided to try and bleach it away with potassium ferricyanide. The sky in that corner had little to no tone so the bleaching would not show up badly. My experience is that it is difficult to bleach small specific areas.  I was also concerned that the density of silver would not bleach completely. I applied the bleach to the area with a Q-tip (cotton bud in the UK) and refreshed the bleach every minute or so. The lines all went away. I then applied fixer to dissolve the silver bromide away in the same manner and then did my final hypo clearing and wash. Whew!.

Iron Blue Toning

I mixed up a fresh batch of blue toner from the Moersch MT7 Iron Blue toning kit. I used the same dilution as I tried before in a previous post as I liked most of the results I got.  This was a dilution of 2+2+5+2 which is the number of milliliters of each component Part 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively. These are added to 500 milliliters of distilled water. I also mixed the clearing bath per the instructions. I then toned different prints at 1, 2, and 3 minutes which gave a range from very subtle dark blue to quite blue. 

Blue toned 1 minute

Blue toned 2 minutes

Blue toned 3 minutes

Composition Comparisons

The different versions of shifted images do give very different visual result. A small shift does look like double or blurred vision. Interesting but not the kind of aesthetic I strive for. It appears to me more abstract. The further the shifts are apart the more natural it looks. I show the different shifts below from smallest to largest. Since some of these images were toned blue as above I have converted them to black and white so comparisons of composition can be focussed on. 

Shift 1

Shift 2

Shift 3

Original Shift