Revisiting Wye Valley Forest: Part II

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. There is a lack of tone in some of the highlights as a result. Because of the staining present in this old paper especially in the borders I gave a quick bleach in Potassium Ferricyanide (1+12) bleach again for less than a minute, then refixed the prints. This clears the staining without impacting the highlights too much. I then did an archival wash to prep for toning.

The results uphold the lith principle that less exposure results in higher contrast. In this case the highlights almost disappear as they don't have enough time to develop. In some there is probably no developed silver in the highlights. This will tell in any subsequent toning. The less exposed the image is the less I like the result. These might have been improved with more time in the developer.