Fresh Prints ~ New Insight

Today was not the best of days in the darkroom. Intervening variables made themselves known during the printing session, rendering two prints useless. Not the important part of the printing session. I've allowed my my calibrated eye to lose sight of the density objective, for most images. The nice bright densities slipped in to leave two negatives more contrasty than needed, losing texture in the top two tonal ranges as well as suppressing the lower tonal ranges from overprinting.

Today's printing session was working with the Kallitype. There are elements of that process I find enjoyable, even intriguing, although it is not the easiest process to nail down. As you know, the Kallitype is a mixed process; printing out before developing out. The print time being roughly 50% of normal print time, and I can only imagine that is derived from a fully printing out process such as the salt paper process. It is the other silver process I work with, and the one I worked in thirty years ago. I feel at home with salted silver printing, a printing out process.

As I mentioned before, the Kallitype will print more contrasty than the salted silver print, using the same negative and toning procedure. In my case it is because I use 13% silver solution for salted silver and the Kallitype calls for 10% solution in equal parts ferric oxalate. The lower silver percentage will create much deeper blacks; dMax. This print has plenty of dMax value, as well as Zone 7 and above, and that makes the image overall too contrasty for my taste. The second floor area of the restaurant should have full texture, and the areas under the roofed sidewalk could be a bit denser to hold in more texture as a Zone 3, instead of Zone 2. This is one of those prints I will hang on my wall for awhile, an artist's proof. When this one is reprinted it will have all the tonal values in place.

The drawback to the density setting method for negatives I use is that it is a visual calibration, and therein lies potential missteps like this one simply being too contrasty, too long a density range. I have already gone through the next batch of upcoming negatives to reset them to the corrected calibration.

Paper; Revere Platinum ~ Print time 10 minutes; the print time is correct

Palladium toned Kallitype
"Longhorn Restaurant" ~ 8"x10" ~ 1/5
Tombstone, Arizona