Conclave for the Alders: More Lith Work
Another day, another day in the darkroom.
The morning dawned bright and clear; a flawed full moon shown in the west while Venus has risen quite high-up in the eastern sky, the gradient of light-yellow fading to cornflower blue in the east pricked by this one unfailing light. Mollie and I are out for our morning walk around the village, this time to some fields. She noses under the gate and is off like a shot sprinting along the hedgerows as fast as her little legs can carry her. She has that unbounded joy today and perhaps because a terrible storm blew through last night, she feels a sense of relief or release in this clear dawn. As we cross the fields, she zigs then zags in front of me from one hedgerow to the next, joy and happiness with each bounding exertion.
This morning after coffee, cereal and some light reading I decided to address some errors from yesterday and re-print some liths. I have some 8x10 sheets left from previous experiments, some of Seagull Exhibition paper which acts very much like my regular Oriental Seagull. I also have an 8x10 sheet of Forte Poly Warm Tone (PWT).
Based on yesterday's experience I expose these at f11 one at 32 seconds (double strength) and the other two at 16 seconds. To each I add a burn of the sky of an equal interval (1 stop). (This is my correction for yesterday's errors.)
Three minutes in the microwave gets the fresh developer nicely hot and the whole session was over in about 5 minutes.
As expected, the PWT has a green tinge which I don't like much. I toned this in Selenium 1+3 for less than 30 seconds and got a much (too?) warmer version (last of the following three prints). I also gave the same though longer treatment to one sheet of the Seagull.
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| scan021-f11 16 sec burn sky 16 sec selenium Oriental Seagull Exhibition G-2 |
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| scan022-f11 32 sec burn sky 32 sec Oriental Seagull Exhibition G-2 |
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| scan023-f11 16 sec burn sky 16 sec selenium tone Forte Polywarmtone (PWT) |
I typically print my liths in 8x10 even going as far as to cut down a sheet to 8x10s. This is borne partially out of conservation of scarce paper (I have one sheet of Fotospeed lith 16x20" left), partially because I have tons of Seagull in 8x10, and because I like smaller prints lately. They are easier to make frames for and I can hang many more of them in the house.
Still u/mcarterphoto on Reddit encouraged me to find a way to make a larger lith and I suppose this has been working on my mind. I do not have a 16x20 tray and lith development I think needs a full-size tray given the length of time for judging the snatch point. Then I remembered that Mollie's crate she sleeps in has a shallow plastic tray I could repurpose.
I cleaned up the tray then prepped a print. I reset my easel for the larger print again. Before I raised the enlarger head, I removed the negative and measured the light at the baseboard at Ev 7.1 (ISO 100). Then reinstalled the negative raised the enlarger head and refocused and scaled the image to the easel. I then removed the negative and adjusted the aperture until I got an Ev of 7.1 again which put me at f5.6. This way my previous timings could be reused on the new larger print.
I made one print on Oriental Seagull Exhibition G-2 paper with a 16 second exposure and a burn of the sky at 16 seconds.
I first confirmed how much liquid I needed in the tray by putting 2 liters of water in it. That gave about 10mm of depth to work with. I then prepared some fresh developer. I poured the old brown from this morning into the tray and mixed another liter of fresh developer which I heated for 3 minutes in the microwave.
Because it would take so long to move the print from the tray to the stop bath, I really didn't want the developer to proceed as quickly as it did yesterday. I was happy to have a mix of hot and cool developer to slow down the process, so the development doesn't run away from me while I move the print.
This worked well but the burn of the sky made the print pretty patchy. I made second print without the sky burning. It turned out well, but I am not sure it is better than the conventional print.
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| f5.6 16 seconds Oriental Seagull Exhibition G-2 Paper 13"x20" |
I suppose toning is next.
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