MorseBlog

I continue on this journey today with some more experiments. First, I am still trying to extract warmer tones with Fish and Chips being part of this process. Fish and Chips is a rehalating bleach based on potassium permanganate as the bleach agent and the use of sodium chloride as the source of the halogen rather than the traditional potassium bromide.  The impetus was to be able to develop and tone silver chloride in the bleached areas. The trouble is my only source of warm tone developer is the lith developer EasyLith. Today I recalled that I have some old Ilford Universal PQ developer that I stopped using as I don't like the warmish tone it delivers. The trouble is that Universal PQ is formulated with both KBr (Potassium Bromide) and BZT (Benzotriazole) as a restrainer. BZT delivers a cool tone while KBr contributes warmer tones.  I took some test prints from the prior session that had been developed in Moersch ECO 4812 developer to get a neutral to cold tone print. I the...

This print I call 4+1 I made last year in Holme Fen. It has stuck with me as a nice image and I have included it in my Three Wood Lands photobook . The first time I printed it I took a test print and hand colored it . It looked alright but I cropped out the flaws in photoshop so it needed to be done again at some point.  4+1 Blog Post Cover Image (Cold Tone) I had read somewhere that for hand coloring prints it is preferable to use a warm tone image. I set about combining the need to make a better hand colored version with an experiment with sepia toning and hand coloring. I made 4 different prints. Normally I make these prints for hand coloring a half or full stop lighter so the color has a chance to shine.  For all the images I used Ilford MG Art 300 paper as it has a cotton rag base and the texture is much like watercolor paper. This paper is my favorite for hand coloring with pencils as the rough texture takes the color easily. I developed them all with Moersch Eco 4812 wh...

In my recent post on printing some of my woodlands project I printed on a paper I had not used in a while, Ilford MG FB Classic. I wanted to record some of the characteristics of this paper with respect to exposure, development, and toning.  The promotional material says the following Double-weight 255g/m2 fiber base Improved maximum density (Dmax) Shorter exposure time Uniform grade separation Choice of glossy and matt surfaces Exposure With respect to exposure, I could compare it directly with the MG Art 300 paper from this printing session and found MGFB Classic to be almost exactly one stop faster than the MG Art 300 paper. Probably slightly less than one stop in some of my examples. Because the paper is multi-grade it is difficult to make a general claim as each emulsion has different relative sensitivity across the range of filtration. However this rule of thumb allows you to get close without the trouble of test strips.  Development This was a real surprise in this sess...

My last visit to Holme Fen left me with some good images I wanted to get printed in the darkroom. I face a number of choices around which paper to print on and what size or sizes to print. My current favorite paper Ilford MG Art 300 I am concerned may not do well with images that have lots of small detail or lots of complexity due to the texture of the cotton rag paper base. So I chose to print some images on Ilford MGFB Classic paper to confirm or deny my feeling on this.  I also printed the same image in different sizes or crops. This is driven by a number of factors. First I still like looking at bigger prints. However bigger prints mean bigger frames and more space on the wall. There is a limit to how many of these prints I can display.  Recently I have been making my own small simple frames ranging from 4x4, 8x8, 9.5x9.5, and 9.5x12 inches. These frames are more affordable (and fun to make) and I can fit a lot on a wall or bookcase. I have also made the frames so that I c...

Introduction In a couple of earlier posts on my physical split printing and toning ( Here and here ) I used Wephota FO5 technical film for the transparency portion of the work. Being a technical film it is very high contrast which can be a benefit and a curse. For the physical split printing project the film worked well enough; however I wished for higher contrast to allow more of the substrate image tones to show through the surface image. I also have been exploring masking in the enlarger and my work so far has struggled to get a high enough contrast dodge mask so there is a second use for controlling for higher contrast.  Another area I have worked on was my Lith-Lith prints  where I created a warm tone positive transparency from technical film that I mounted over aluminum foil for a spectacular look. In this case I want to reduce contrast so more of the primary image tones show. So again a desire to control for contrast. The final piece to this was that a number of years a...

I moved on from my previous post to try some more ideas I developed as I worked on those prints. I decided to try and make a higher contrast film and a toned film. New Film Versions Higher Contrast: Expose f8 11 seconds full development 3 mins Eco 4812 Bleach 1+10 for 5 minutes. Fix 1 minute.  Selenium toned: Expose f8 11 seconds develop 45 seconds. Selenium 1+3 tone about 1 minute for purple tone.  The trouble I soon find is that I have a lot of combinations that are possible now as I can mix and match papers and films. Below is the comparison matrix. The bottom row is the same from the previous blog post. A map is offered below to help describe what the variations are.  Summary Table Legend for Image Matrix Thoughts on the Results A couple of things come out from this. 1) The higher contrast film allows more of the underlying image tone through. 2) A toned mask tends to dominate the overall color. This is in part because the negative is high contrast and as such the ma...