MorseBlog

I went looking for another image in the back catalog to try some of my recent lith work on. The one I settled on was one taken on a foggy day (Fog seems to fit these techniques well where contrast manipulation is difficult with multi-grade papers.)  This one I never successfully printed. Taken across a field from the edge of the woods, the fog was so thick as to almost render the trees invisible from that distance. When I was there the edge of existence seemed compelling. In a print it amounts to a lot of white paper except for the foreground.  Scan of negative The scan above has the contrast tweaked quite a bit in curves. After composing and focusing (a grain focuser comes in real handy here) I started by setting the aperture according to my Ev (@ISO 100) of 3 rule as measured in the fog. This left the trees around Ev 4 and the field in the foreground around Ev 5. This gave me f8 for 32 seconds though most I printed at f5.6 at 16 seconds which is the same exposure but just a ...

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 expand my toning regime and dip my toe into gold toning. It seems to work well with lith development where the warmer tones get more of a blue cast to them. Iron blue toning can be garish, and I am looking for something more muted. Another option was to try cobalt with iron as it can get some lovely blue tones that takes away some of the harshness iron toning alone can have. Without a lot of research, I bought some Nelson Gold (MT6) toner for Wolfgang Moersch. I bought it and a refresh of his EasyLith directly from him as none as in stock in the UK. Even with shipping from Germany it was cheaper than if I had ordered it locally, something to keep in mind. He also sells a conventional gold toner called MT10 and used to sell one called MT9 that is no longer listed on his site. I confused the descriptions of the MT9 and MT6 toners which led me to buy the MT6 toner.  Gold toner can be disappointing if you have a neutral or cold tone paper and developer. It does not shift t...

Gosh I am having a great time again in the darkroom. After a long hiatus and seemingly unable to get motivated in that direction the last week has been close to continuous activity as evidenced by the last 4 blog posts. Part of it was clearing out the shared space of the darkroom which I share with the laundry room. It is also realizing that my basic skills don't fail. That is not to say I am terribly talented here but I believe I am competent and consistent in practice as well as results. That makes a huge difference. I have been learning this since 2013 when I bought my first enlarger.  For those new to it keep up the work. Once the habits and learnings are in place then the ease enhances the joy. I can attribute some of this joy to my automated setup for split grade printing. It eases some of the monotony and reduces errors. That being said the time alone can also be contemplative. My first day back this week, I discovered that my Fomabrom Variant 123 pack of 12x16 paper w...