MorseBlog

Introduction to Iron Blue Toning I got a few acceptable prints from the Wye forest printing session. I decided to try some blue toning. I have found that blue toning works well in foggy forest scenes.   I use the Moersch MT4 Iron Blue toning kit. The kit is simple in that it has 4 parts that you mix with distilled water. There is also a clearing solution to mix. I mix all this as single use. I tend to make 500ml for 8x10 prints which works well in small trays. The toner doesn’t last long about an hour or two.  I always start with my old test prints to establish tone and timing. Blue toner changes color under different conditions. With denser/darker images the blue is less apparent and more cyan in lighter toned images. Length of time in the toning solution also effects the tone as more silver takes up iron. There is a sharp break for instance between 30 seconds and 60 seconds. 30 seconds delivers an understated dark blue tone while 60 seconds is much stronger.  You can a...

Another in this short series on printing some images shot in the Wye valley. A foggy day and a wide open lens led to some very soft images that have a different look than I am accustomed to.  This image is one where what I visualized was not what ended up on the negative. I saw this glimpse of light in the depth of the forest and the outline of some trees there. However as is often the case in forests there is a strong light from the bright, though foggy, sky. This lit up some of the red cedar boughs in the upper right and the ferns in the foreground.  In order to recover what I was seeing at the time from the negative I must do some creative burning to keep the eye focused on the central subject. These prints I made on RC paper Ilford MGIV RC. I didn't think the image was very promising and I have a small stack of the RC paper I haven't touched in some while. Here is the first print after test strips.   ...

I while back as I headed deeper into committing to large format I was looking into a range of subjects and came upon staining developers. These developers not only reduce the silver ion to metallic silver but also incorporate a staining effect around the film grains. There are claims of high accutance and some swear by the effect the colored stain has on VC papers when printed from staining developers as the VC papers have spectral sensitivity. Better gradation of tones is one highlight of this. These developers started out based on pyrogallol back to 1851. There are a number of formulas available among them are Pyrocat-HD, ABC Pyro, Rollo Pyro, PMK, and WD2D+. A few articles here for the interested. 1) Introduction to Pyro Developers 2) Staining Developers  I went to my usual source for darkroom sorcery Wolfgang Moersch to see what he had to offer. He has Pyro 48, Finol, Tanol and Tanol speed. I decided Tanol looked best to try out first. (The new Pyro 48 looks interesting...

As soon as I got the film developed from my woodland photography I wanted to print some of it. I started out with one of the 4x5 negatives. All of these negatives however are big enough to need my ‘ Beast ’ enlarger. Birch and Grass The Beast is on the third floor (American reference) (second floor British reference) with my conventional wet darkroom on the 1st/Ground floor. The process is involved as I run my print on the upper floor and then stuff the print in a light tight tube and troop it downstairs for developing and fixing. I chose to print this on Ilford MGIV RC 12x16” paper. I have been printing a lot this year on Ilford MG ART 300 12x16 paper. I really like this paper however it is very expensive and being fiber-based takes a long time to fix, wash, and dry. So I took the expedient route. Once I have printed something I like I can translate to the better paper those prints I think hold the most promise. I ran my new darkroom process based off Les McClean’s proce...

Introduction (Originally written in Oct 2016) A Photable My grandfather Cushman Morse (the Grandchildren knew him as Grandpa Cushy) tried to start a small business shortly after he he moved his family from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts to Phoenix Arizona around 1948. The move precipitated by my father's asthma where a drier climate was recommended. My grandparent lived the rest of their lives in Arizona. My grandfather was an avid photographer at the time and would later start camera store in Phoenix called Cushy's Cameras. He used a large format 4x5 view camera though I am unsure of the make. The business was called Photables and were coffee tables with a large black and white print under glass. In a previous post on this blog I said... He had a local carpenter make the tables and he took the photos, usually custom, that he then placed under a sheet of glass for the table top. He started with a 4x5 negative and printed it in his own darkroom. My father recalls he devel...