New Gum over Palladium Print Beginning

The lengthy hiatus since the last posting of "Two Friends" is most regrettable, as I try hard to keep the momentum moving along just so there aren't long blank periods. Truth be told I was working on a home project, long promised to my sweet wife, finally done. We live in the desert whereupon a yard here is covered in two inches of river rock, or more. I just shoveled and moved 14 yards/tons of said river rock, spreading it over an eighth of an acre, in the desert heat. Such is life.

I have had to adapt my normal negative printing setup, to gum over printing demands, which calls for a different density range for the negative. This new arrangement begins in conjunction with also altering how the negatives are printed. Whereas I have always printed my own negatives on inkjet printers, being I am one that wants full control over the process, for obvious reasons. The advancement of inkjet printers continues with the focus on making finished prints on art papers. That direction improves the outcome of the prints on paper, using ever more ink cartridges with wider array of colors. My one and only use of an inkjet printer is making a negative. Using a new Epson or Canon printer to make my negatives would cost me ten times what I pay to have a laser negative printed onto acetate, at 600dpi, not 300dpi. I'm quite happy with the results. My task was to set the density range of the negatives to match the laser printer being used, which is entirely different than inkjet printers, and no two laser printers are set the same, as they can be adjusted for output density onto acetate.

The new print is drying as I write this. I will copy it once it has dried down, for tomorrow's post. It is the base image for the new gum over print to come. For now, I am working with the "poor man's" palladium print. It is said that one century ago there were likely more "poor man's" platinum's than printed platinum's. As most photographers know, platinum is rather expensive, many times more than palladium and probably a hundred times more than silver. When a silver image is toned in platinum, or palladium, the more nobler metal totally replaces the silver salts with the Pt/Pd salt, thereby making the print a Pt or Pd print. If you make a mistake or there is any flaw in a printed platinum image, of course it doesn't get sold or used, and that means throwing away a bunch of money. If you print the image in silver, then tone in platinum, you have a platinum to show. I do this with palladium.

Any silver print can be toned to a palladium print. Thirty five years ago when I worked gum over printing I printed over salted silver prints; salt paper process. I still have them. Today I prefer to make Kallitype prints. One of the reasons is the ability to control the print color, by developers and developing temperature. The Kallitype process is the same process as modern platinum or palladium printing, for the most part. There are caveats with platinum and the developers. Palladium has a much longer tonal range potential than platinum. Palladium can handle the full scale of a salted silver print, which can print an image using a negative of Log 1.8, or higher. Platinum would not respond well to such a negative, but palladium would.

The negatives I am using now for gum over printing are, for all practical purposes, the densities I would use for a grade two silver gelatin paper; Log .8 to .9. I know this because I now have a densitometer, and I've been doing much comparison to other negatives and their reciprocal prints. I would not have believed it if I didn't have prints right in front of me demonstrating that fact rather nicely. Dry down is important so I won't be posting the image here. What I would like to mention is that for whatever reason, I happened to check the "Stats" section under the posting icon, to find two dozen visits with over eighty page clicks, all from Russia. I must say I feel very honored by that.

If one of those visitors was Maria V. Vinogradova I would be a lot more honored. It wasn't until very recently that I came to find two other gum over printers, one of them being Maria V. Vinogradova, who lives in Moscow, and makes some very beautiful gum over cyanotype prints. Her technique is flawless, her images glow. I should also mention the other gum over printer I know, out of fairness, and that would be Diana Bloomfield, of North Carolina. As it turns out, Diana was in Tucson very recently giving a workshop in gum over palladium printing. Kudos to that.

Since this has morphed into a short ramble, I would mention a thought I have held since I began printing again. In the late 1980's I was one of the founding members of the Eugene/Irkutsk Sister City Committee, and as a board member I chaired the committee newsletter and did the photographic recording of events and people. At that time I had a commercial photographic/video production studio. It was through this that a Russian/American photographer exchange was devised and planned, with several Russian photographers being part of it. Many of those photographs hung on my studio walls, as can be seen in the photo. I'm the one pointing towards Russian version of the Welcome signs. While I was setting up the formal group photograph, in a studio full of photographers, this shot was taken. It is my hope that some day, once again photographers from both countries will share their images.
Eugene/Irkutsk Sister City Committee Photographers Exchange; 1990