MorseBlog

Reflecting on my original post and my complaint about the thinness of the negative I decided I should  try and intensify the negative. There are many ways to to this including a very old technique of using Mercury Chloride (not a good idea!), Chromium, Sepia toner, ot Selenium toner. Fotospeed makes a Chromium intensifier intended for darkening thin negatives. I have never tried this but this is one way to go.  Andrew Sanderson's excellent blog has instructions on using Sepia toner . This involves bleaching then toning the negative. He does a great show and tell to explain the process.  Finally I use Selenium toner. Why? Mostly because I already have Selenium toner mixed up for my printing use. It is also dead simple. Just dunk the negative into selenium mixed a 1+3.  I give it about 3 minutes. I get anywhere from a 1/2 stop to full stop improvement.  I gave a short write up here but realized though I was satisfied with the improvement I didn't show si...

I first explored paper negatives when I wanted to print a color slide and needed to create an inter-negative in this post . I have since made an 8x10 large format camera and made paper negatives to test it.   Andrew Sanderson at thewebdarkroom has written a nice treatise on the paper negative and I highly recommend buying it. It is available on Blurb . Andrew's book introduced me to new ideas about paper negatives. Surprisingly for me he moves beyond contact prints and suggests loading paper in a medium format or 35mm camera. This can then be put in an enlarger. The result while not as crisp as a film negative has its own quality that he shows suits some subjects. I was inspired to try this out. Some time ago I found a good price on ebay for a rolleiflex/cord back that takes dark slide glass plate holders along with 4 plate holders. At the time the price was negligible and I  thought it might come in useful if I got into making glass plates. It sat in the shelf for som...