Please bear with me as I work through a year’s backlog of negatives.



Photography
Please bear with me as I work through a year’s backlog of negatives.
Last summer I acquired a bunch, and I mean A BUNCH, of old Agfa Brovira paper. I was hoping to use it for lith processing. Last night I finally got in the darkroom and was not disappointed.
This week I’m going into the darkroom for the first time in a year. As much as I am looking forward to printing silver gelatin, I’m glad I spent the time off doing cyanotypes.
Bergger has started selling Print Film, a blue sensitivee sheet film for doing duplication work in the darkroom AND, of course, as an alternate camera film. I bought a pack of 4X5 sheets as soon as I learned about.
I took the Graflex Crown Graphic down to FDR Park this weekend for a test run.
I developed these in a tray for 4 minutes using HC110 dilution A at room temperature, which I conveniently forgot to measure. The data sheet on this says to use any developer with the time of development affecting the amount of contrast. I went for the low-end of the time suggestions.
I needed a break from all this uptight pushing and shoving. So I brewed some tea.
More experimentation with cyanotypes and toning in coffee. These are all old negatives.
I haven’t worked much with cyanotypes because I don’t really care for blue prints. But with Covid keeping me out of the darkroom and all the ingredients sitting in my studio, it made sense to try.
A little research made it clear that toning gave me more options than just blue. Here are the results so far. look for more as I work through the process.
The blue
The black: coffee
The gold: tea
We got a COVID kitten.
Went out with the Nikon fm2 and a roll of Svema MZ3. Makes the world seem darker.
The garden is in bloom!