Zero Catastrophe Rate

I think I'm coming to terms with selenium. Last night my toning results weren't quite what I expected but they roughly matched my last outcome. I can live with consistency. Especially when that consistency excludes disaster.

Piano, Coleman, FL - Kallitype

Just a note - the images here are scans of the untoned kallitypes, which look closer to the actual selenium toned prints than the scans of those prints do. Yeah, doesn't make a lot sense to me either.

For the time being I've settled at diluting Ilford's Rapid Selenium Toner to 1+200 and letting it rest for about 10-20 minutes. By letting it sit for a while, it seems to dissipate a bit of the ammonia stench that not only burns the nostrils but wreaks havoc on prints. I honestly doubt there's any real effect at this low dilution but it makes me feel better. This is my voodoo science, doubt it at your own risk.

The Other Piano, Coleman, FL - Kallitype

The changes produced by the toning are very subtle. Contrast is given a slight bump at the expensive of highlight detail.

The color shift is also very subtle. Originally the prints were much more reddish brown. The selenium rolls them ever so slightly back toward neutral, although they stay very warm.

The biggest challenge has been determining how much toning to give them. The prints in the toning bath look much different than the dry prints the next morning, which look slightly different from the dry prints several days later.

Chair, Coleman, FL - Kallitype

All together, I've been thrilled with the outcome of this round of printing. I'd love to ride this wave of success but I'm down to only a couple of sheets of paper left and trying to find someone with a stock of Arches Platine would be a wasted effort. Rumor is that the next run will be in March. 

Skylight, Coleman, FL - Kallitype

Back at it.

I can't believe it's been almost two months since I've done any printing. The silver stains on the counter are still there from the mass of pre-christmas present production. (I don't suspect I'll be removing them anytime soon, either.) It was nice that those in the family receiving Kallitypes for presents enjoyed them, despite not having a clue of what I was talking about with sensitizer this and gold chloride that. I'm okay with that since they understood they were handmade and recognized the amount of time that went in to making them.

Maybe it's the time commitment that deters all non-hackers from alt printing. I spent six hours last night making 10 prints with only 6.5 of those being acceptable. And that was just digital neg through falling asleep with prints floating around in my kitchen sink. Doesn't count all the time spent taking the images, developing, scanning and processing. And they still have to be toned. It's like running multiple endurance races and finding that sometimes the trophies smell like bad cheese.

Ricketts Glen State Park, PA - Untoned Kallitype

The other problem is that all the prints I made last night were tiny and more experiment than anything. They aren't destined to be display pieces. In a moment of anti-brilliance, I bought an awkward size paper and can only get one 8x10 per sheet while leaving behind plenty of scraps. I decided to put them to good use by using up my remaining dribbles of sensitizer and being a proving ground for images that may or may not make a decent Kallitype print.


One image, which I thought might be impossible to print, was impossible to print. Because I tried to cram too much under World's Shoddiest UV Box, another became a blurry mess. (Possibly a reason to build World's Shoddiest UV Box a big brother, or more likely to cannibalize the current one to build an even more dangerous contraption.)

O'Connell Bridge, Dublin - Untoned Kallitype

The bridge picture caused the remaining 1.5 botched prints. Well, the first was entirely my fault, seeing as my digital negative wasn't so much negative. I wish I hadn't thrown it away as it did make an interesting reversed line image. I looked to see if I could retrieve it from the trash this morning but the combination of having not been fixed and being a repository for used coffee grounds has made it a smelly disappointment. The second attempt, now with a proper negative, looked fine until I scanned it. That's when I noticed that my piece of shit inkjet (which I love very much) had decided to do all sorts of banding on the negative. Not sure why, after printing many successful digital negs, it started acting up now. The heaviest band can be seen on the left of the image and the lighter bands are noticeable in the clouds.

Farquhar Park, York, PA - Untoned Kallitype

There were at least a few minor achievements out of this printing extravaganza. I've managed to boost the sharpness quite a bit in the prints. Over-sharpening with unsharp mask in photoshop helps significantly. The increased grain, while very visible on a computer screen, doesn't print through at all. The second is something I should have been doing all along. It was one of those forehead slapping moments of "oh my god, what an idiot I've been". Flip the image horizontally in PS so it can actually be printed "emulsion" down. It's amazing how much more crisp the image is without being diffused by the thickness of the base. I want to go back and reprint everything I've done so far after I finish banging my head on the desk. But I won't. Takes too damn long.


I'm very happy with the rest of the prints and will post them with a tone of despair after I've destroyed them while refining my selenium toning process. That is, after all, the most likely outcome.

Lessons in Alt Processes

My latest obsession has become Kallitype printing. Why? Good question.

For the last few years nearly all of my printing has been done on my Epson P.O.S. on Ilford Paper. I've been surprisingly happy with the results. But I missed the good old days (nights actually) I spent in my parent's basement doing traditional silver gelatin printing. At the time I was shooting black and white 35mm developed (poorly) in a dark bathroom. Looking back at the old negatives makes me shiver and the prints I was making would get an F+. Not a complete failure but not something I ever wanted to look at again. But it was fun!

I've wanted to get back into printing but my current apartment makes that seriously difficult. At least when I develop film, the combination of a changing bag and a daylight tank make processing in my kitchen a breeze. The basement was an ideal location but there are no basements in Florida. I have a bathroom with no windows but the door is about as light-tight as a greenhouse and its size will make claustrophobes twitch. The other issue is equipment. I still have my enlarger. It's still in the exact same spot in my parent's basement a thousand miles away. However, it's set up for 35mm and I've been shooting 120 and 4x5 almost exclusively for the past five years. I thought there wasn't anything I could do, until I made a trip back home last month.

My mom is huge into family history and will never hesitate to show off old family photos. It's strange that I had never really looked at them before, but when I did I was blown away by the quality of some of the turn-of-the-century prints. The studio portraits, like most of the era, were shot under north light with dreadfully slow plate cameras. And they were gorgeous. But some of the prints had a very different feel to them and I had no idea what they were. To the internet! I started looking at various processes being used around that time and trying to match the results to the old family photos. I still don't know what the photos I was looking at actually were, but this got me interested in old photo processes. And believe it or not there's still people doing this kind of thing (sort of). After reading about these I realized that I could actually pull-off making these prints in my apartment.

Here's why:
1. They don't need an enlarger. They're contacted printed from camera negatives or inkjet negs printed on transparency film.
2. They're not really sensitive to light. At least not in the normal sense. Most of the sensitizers are only responsive to light in the UV part of the spectrum. Sunlight will expose them but a weak tungsten bulb won't do anything.

So after a bunch of research I decided to go with Kallitypes. I really like how they look. There's an infinite number of ways to vary the tones. They're not all that expensive to make. And I can make them in my kitchen.

At this point I'm going to skip over details of the actual process. I promise I will go into great detail of my methods in the near future. Believe me, you will hear all about the World's Shoddiest UV Box. This is more along the lines of my impressions of the printing process and the lessons I've learned after my first two sessions with it.

This is the first print I made. Exciting, huh? To me it actually was. It was the culmination of a lot of planning, mixing chemicals, building things, and hoping this whole ordeal was not going to be a complete failure. It proved that World's Shoddiest UV Box actually worked (this was a 5 minute exposure). It proved that while given the opportunity to screw up any number of things - I hadn't. It took until the fourth print for things to go wrong.

I'll apologize now for the scans. They don't do the prints justice at all. I love my scanner (Epson V700) and it does an excellent job with film. It did not do well with these prints. It seems to have serious trouble with the incredible density of the shadows and the slight texture of the paper surface. What looks beautiful to the naked eye is made into a noisy mess. If anyone has suggestions for scanning these I am listening.

After another test exposure, I made this print from a 4x5 negative in an ancient print frame found on ebay. This one made me nervous. After a Kallitype is exposed, the latent image is visable on the paper. So I knew it was there. When you put it in the developing bath it develops in about 3 seconds...excitment. It then begins to look progressively worse...disappointment. It's not until the print gets put in tray after tray of varying chemicals that it really comes back to life. When I put it in the toner it looked terrible (this is gold toned by the way). Eight minutes later it was looking much better. After a quick wash and a four minute swim in the fixer it looked pretty decent. By the time it had dried I was blown away by how good it looked.

I'm not going to post the next print that was made. Despite reading over and over again that this process requires a dense and super-contrasty negative I decided to try and print a very thin negative. Mistake. I ended up with a super dark muddy mess where the only interesting bit is the brush strokes at the edge of the paper.

This is the last print I made on my first night. It highlights a lot of things that can go wrong. First of all, I coated a lot more of the paper than I needed to (light pencil marks are really hard to see under a red safe light). This isn't a huge problem except that I found it seems to exhaust toner like it's its job. The blotches on the forehead and on the rest of the paper are probably caused by water that got onto the sensitizer when I kind of dropped the paper into the bathtub. Pro-tip: DO NOT DROP FRESHLY COATED PAPER INTO BATHTUB. It's not like the tub was full but there's an excellent chance it wasn't entirely dry from the last time I used the shower. The other possibility is that there was water left in the brush from rinsing it off between coatings. Now I don't rinse the brush either. If you look closely at the bottom of the paper you'll see what looks like crinkles in the paper. This is from trying to jam the print into a tray that was too small for the paper. Always make sure that the trays you're using (in this case it was actually a glass baking dish) is larger than the paper you're trying to put into it.