In the early nineties I produced television programs, mostly for local or regional audiences. One happened to be about fishing. The Oregon's Local Sportsman. You can look it up. I put twenty programs in the can which were then aired. In every one of those shooting episodes the host, Jack Cabe, was sometimes hysterically anxious about the possibility of not getting "Fish On!". No need to explain that one. I can tell you this now as he passed a number of years ago.
Okay, the reason I took your time in telling you that is simply, in life, there are times the best lain plans don't actually turn out like that, for so many wonderful reasons. Thus we come to the proverbial point in that the lesson for today is keeping fresh chemistry when planning on doing something like, say, testing. One run was a demonstration of... "this isn't supposed to happen". Thus an inspection showed the solution of silver was beginning to coagulate and break down. That would explain the dysfunction, thus another test was set up, which resulted in another anomaly which of course wasn't supposed to happen. Both of which add up to deep annoyance, for being such an idiot, just before deep embarrassment. No "Fish On!", nothing to show the camera but bait dangling from a stupid hook. That, is so much like public shrinkage. My apologies for that.
The very good part of the day was that PJ had a chance to print his first salted silver print. Turned out well and he was happy, working on digital negatives for the next printing. Print testing or not, there was much learned. I have never been the scrupulous scientific type, not that I'm not cognitively aware of them, but I tend to follow the intuitive awareness, the body knowing type of thing. Something you do over and over seeing the tiny changes being made, adjusting things to get everything just right. For me, that isn't a formula as much as a learned feeling for something. I also don't need to explain that to this crowd.
The bottom line being the thing that made it all possible, the Solar Printer, worked flawlessly. The print time for PJ's digital negative, although to my eye, was amazingly thin, was twelve minutes, and I will admit I didn't believe it at first. The green image was a color layer flattened in Photoshop, as per Dan Burkholder's online instructions, of which PJ studied for days. The green really, really retards effective UV light passing through a sheet of OHC film. My negatives look like glass Colloidal negatives in comparison. I was getting print times of 5 minutes & 7 minutes for a salted silver and Kallitype, respectively. I was really impresses with the green negative thing.
I posted an article on the difference between Dan Burkholder's method of preparing a negative for the right density range, using "Curves" and then laying a green color over the negatives. What I am finding in printing digital negatives is the reaching a full density range for a silver or palladium print has to do with moving the entire contrast index line, not just the middle. There will be ample examples of that soon, as the negatives I found to have too long a density curve did print down using the Solar Printer. I couldn't get taht to happen facing the print into the sun for over ten minutes, suppressing the middle tones. The next print test will include two negatives with the density values that have shown to fall onto the same correct index cure that the silver requires for a full spectrum print.
Dealing with life issues, like a very old friend who happens to be a contractor, dive down from Phoenix to help me find the electrical break problem I am having with my Master Cool. I don't do electrical projects well. That's strays into the area of me making C Print enlarged color images. Two colors I don't actually see like normal people are green and red. That makes a difference. My next ability for darkroom time now is Friday, three days away. The most difficult task until then will be coming up with something useful to say on a blog.....
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