MorseBlog

I have returned to this old paper recently and have decided to try lith printing it again. It is a single grade warmtone paper from the 1970's. When I first bought it I found it lithed well and this has been born out again. I used Fotospeed Lith developer in that first trial and now I use Moersch EasyLith and have learned a bit more about lith printing since then.  Everything I learned in that original post bore out in my work today. The paper develops really fast in hot lith developer within seconds for the first print at a +3 stop overexposure. The developer settled down as the developer cooled and I reduced the exposure. I actually managed to get good prints (indeed the best) with very little exposure. As a gauge of this a reasonable conventional print was made at f8 for 32 seconds. The second print was made with less exposure at f8 for 22 seconds.   I used a negative from my Fuji GFX 50s ii digital camera made at Gammatech . This was an image I took at night during a...

This is a series of prints made from my 'Lower Sand Creek in Winter ' project that I worked on last winter. The images were taken on my Fuji GFX 50s ii digital camera using a Fuji Acros film simulation. I also restricted the cropping to Xpan (65:24) aspect ratio and I used a Tokina 70-210mm f4 zoom lens on an Olympus mount for their 35mm cameras. I further twisted the methodology by making film negatives from these digital images. (A series of blog posts here ...) I made some conventional prints in the darkroom. Now I am making some lith prints from these negatives. Some of the images work better than others as is typical with lith printing.  For this project I broke out an old batch of obscure paper from Agfa called Rapidoprint. This paper was used in newsrooms to make fast prints on a special machine. It is a single weight paper and may have incorporated developer. I first used this paper in 2015 and though very fogged it did lith reasonably well. I am using Moersch EasyLith ...

I got to thinking about how to create images that incorporate this Japanese concept of 'Ma'. The idea that what isn’t visible is as important as what is. The Wikipedia entry for 'ma' gives this image by Hasegawa Tohaku as an example. It can be hard to find images that incorporate this idea so I thought how I could achieve this in the darkroom.  Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tohaku Inspiration for this process. I took a recent print... Example print of starting point. I had made and then exposed a fresh sheet of Ilford MGRC paper with this same image. I placed this exposed paper in a tray and added enough water to keep it just under the surface.  Next, I took a pipette and loaded it with about 5ml of developer (Moersch ECO 4812 1:10) and dribbled the developer over the exposed paper. In this first example I tended to focus on the first pass along the long central axis. One wants to be careful not to disturb the water bath too much as the objective is to keep the developer conce...

The next phase of any lith printing I do tends to be toning. I never feel in control of my toning, but I manage to stumble into some interesting images as a result. Today I played with some sepia and gold toning but didn't really get anything I liked. I moved onto selenium toning as there can be some rather intense results.  Blog Post Thumbnail Image I use a 1+3 dilution of selenium which always results in strong color changes. For most of my lith the end point (to completion) of selenium toning is a rusty red almost strong sepia tone as seen below.  Wistow ORWO f11 23 sec burn sky 45 sec toned On the way to this color, it passes through a cooler almost purple tone. This led me to think about getting a combination of tones though selective toning. I have done this before, and it works well for images with a strong line like a horizon. I dip the wet print only up to the point I want toned. I try and be careful about where the toner goes. The toner effect can lag quite a bit in ...

After much upheaval in my personal life living a semi-nomadic existence in the USA and UK I have not been in the darkroom for some time. My last effort was at the very end of May just before my move to the USA. I am back in the UK for Christmas and New Years and found some time to do some lith printing. I had to look through the back catalog to find some subjects to print.  Lith Printing Recap In many ways lith printing is easier than conventional printing. The exposure is not critical, and I learned some important techniques back in 2021 that made lith finally click for me. For instance, I meter the exposure on the easel at Ev 4 (ISO 100) in the highlight areas of the image using an incident light meter. This corresponds to about 45 seconds of exposure. I usually bracket this +/-1 stop to start with. Burning helps a lot to balance the exposure on the print. Any sky wants a stop or 2 of burn to bring the tones in line with the foreground.  I also crop out areas that are too ...

I am catching up on some work these past couple of days now that my initial digital intensity has subsided. A result of my earlier project around Houghton meadows was that there were some printable images that I wanted to lith print. One did not turn out well, but a couple of others did.  One obvious candidate was the Heron viewed through the reeds in the water. I printed this conventionally to include in my photo books. The negative does not have much contrast despite being pushed because of the mist and early morning light. The conventional print was done entirely on the #5 filter, and I was not able to get completely black shadows without losing the highlights in the water. I compromised somewhere in the middle. It makes for a good print despite this as the print reflects the conditions on a foggy morning. I made some lith prints on Oriental Seagull paper as well as Fohar Raster which I have to think of as having more soul especially when toned. Since the Rater paper is 5x7" (...

Another set of Lith prints. My last session from this set of negatives I explored as far as I could. The toning did not turn up anything interesting. This next image I have passed up for conventional printing I think because it is off balance. There is a lot of white space on the left side. It does, however, have layers in the branches in the fog and I came to think that what is there is what is not there. That the point of the white space is to suggest what is not there, the unknown.  So, I started to print and develop it with lith developer.  I measured the Ev at ISO 100 in the brushy area under the trees on the right. I set the aperture (f8) for 32 seconds at Ev of 3 which is my reference point. (Again I opened the aperture one stop to f5.6 to cut the exposure time to 16 seconds.) The bright empty area is a full stops less light on the paper so I knew some burning there would be needed.  I tried 2 stops of burn on the left at first, but this was too much so I settled...