New Palladium Print

I have been making good progress with the advances in printing the portfolios. What continues to change, over time, is the printing itself. When I began, I was mostly printing salt paper prints, a holdover from earlier times when that was the process I used exclusively at the time. After taking up the printing recently I began making Kallitype prints. Truth be told, I had thought I wouldn't like it as much as salt paper printing simply because it was a developing out process, when direct inspection of the image during printing is an entirely different thing.

Turns out, I came to like the Kallitype printing, a lot. And when I became ever more familiar with the process, and began seeing a lot of similarities to the platinum/palladium process, I began liking it even more. That turns out, was a good thing, a sort of practiced warm up for the palladium printing to come, and that is turning out better than I could have hoped. The final piece to this process that made palladium printing even better, was the Na2 method, described in the last post. A method developed by Dick Arentz and Richard Sullivan. The simple of it is getting rid of the tradition contrast control element of platinum/palladium printing (ferric oxalate with potassium chlorate) and replace it with a sodium based platinum; sodium chloroplatanate. For the contrast control aspect, different solutions of the platinum are used, beginning with the stock 20% solution, 2 drops for a 5x7 image, if the negative is very soft. The solutions are reduced to 10%, 5% and 2.5% solutions, to be used on medium to contrasty negatives, respectively.

This will likely be the last pure palladium print I will be making. The following prints, beginning tomorrow, will be platinum/palladium prints. Just exactly how deeply awesome that will be will have to wait until then, but I am fairly confident I will be most happy with the results.

The negatives I am currently printing in this portfolio were shot thirty years ago, using Kodak 250 Super XX film, developed in pyro/OH for 18 minutes. They would represent negatives with a density range of approximately 1.5 to 1.8, which is considered optimal for printing platinum/palladium. The palladium images I have been posting are just that, palladium and ferric oxalate. No contrast control needed. I will now begin to use the platinum in the 2.5% solution, adding 2 drops to the normal pd~12 drops fo~11 drops. That mixture remains the same. The extra platinum drops are added to the normal drop count of a print. I explained the benefits of that in the last post so won't repeat it here.

This particular negative, "Jerome House", is likely the most perfect negative I ever shot, density and image detail and texture wise. I would chalk that up to everything lining up, including the light at the time of the shot. The tonal separation, texture and detail is as perfect as a cheap lens allows. What I had wanted to know, for many years, is just how close can a hand coated silver print, using the salt paper process, come to the look and textural feel of a platinum/palladium print? The answer arrived when I made two palladium prints using the same negative I did those years ago, and the images are strikingly similar. I'm not sure many could tell which is why by looking. On the one hand I'm sort of jazzed about that, having made such a print, in both processes.

This print was made in full sunlight, for 8 minutes. The whites are now in the zone 7/8 range, so the printer now has to decide if more time is warranted to print down the zone 8 whites into zone 7 whites, without suppressing the tones below them. For now, I am fairly happy with the print. I will of course be reprinting this image very soon, with platinum in the palladium.

Palladium Print
"Jerome House" ~ 5x7 ~ 2/5
Jerome, Arizona