Processes I learned this week: Lith developing (6.6.17)
1. On Tuesday, Tim gave a demo on lith developing. This process is similar to standard darkroom printing of film negatives, with the following twists. First, the test strip is made with the aperture at f/11, and with 7 seconds as the base and incremental value. This strip is developed using the standard darkroom black and white development procedure. The goal is to find the minimum amount of time it takes to expose a good, dark black. Next, the exposure is increased by 3 stops for the final print. The easiest way to do this is to increase the aperture opening by 3 stops, from f/11 to f/4. After the print is exposed, develop it in special lith developer, which is composed of diluted combination of chemicals used to process lithographic prints. This is the key step which differs dramatically from ordinary printing of black and white film, and hence I will go into detail in the next paragraph.
For this class, we have a solution A and a solution B, each of which are diluted with water by a ratio of 1:24. The recipe for lith developer is 300 ml A + 300 ml B + no more than 50 ml "old brown" mixed in a flat bottomed tray. "Old brown" is spent lith developing solution, and the addition of this small amount helps to initiate the developing process. Lith developing solution tires easily, and the consensus this week was that our formula is spent after developing just three images. Another deviation from the standard development process is to float the small tray of lith developer in a larger tray filled with very warm or hot water. This helps to speed up the developing time overall. Plus, I found it calming to gently agitate the developing print cradled in warm water, while waiting for the first traces of the image to appear.
Lith is a CONTAGIOUS developing process. That means that the dark areas will not develop at a uniform rate, rather the areas of the image with more dark tones will develop faster, as speed is determined by proximity to like values (please correct me if my interpretation is wrong!) In practice, it also means that it takes much longer for the initial image to appear and for the values to darken to the desired level than with the standard developing solution. The rate at which the tones darken accelerates as the contagion spreads, requiring the developer to focus and to have quick reflexes. As times vary with each image, the developer must pay very close attention once the dark values start to fill in. When the desired contrast has been achieved, the print must be snatched from the developer and immediately placed in the stop bath. Standard solutions and times apply to stop and fixing.
In this class, we used the Arista student grade RC paper that one can purchase at the lab. Note that not all papers lend themselves to lith developing. See Tim Rudman for details on which papers work best for lith developing.
After the demo, I made a few lith prints. And a few mistakes. For example, during my first attempt, I forgot to stop up the print exposure and got this stunning result:
This mistake underscores the need for light in the lith developing process. I subsequently stopped up by a factor of 3 by increasing the aperture from 11 to 5.6 (plus two stops), and then doubling the exposure time from 21 to 42 seconds (plus one stop.) I chose this tortuous route as as the lens for medium format negatives only opens to 4.5, so I needed to expand out to the dimension of time for that last stop of light.
Much better. Except I found the image to be a bit too dark. Got distracted during key phase of contagious development. On Thursday, made another lith print.
Coco seems a bit washed out, especially her face. And, so much detail in the image distracts the eye from the subject. I think somewhere in between the two images would be best. Left this aside, not ready to get obsessive about any one image yet, still getting a feel for the process. I made prints of two more negatives from my weekend with Hasselblad.
2. On Thursday, we began the day with instant printing technology, including old school polaroid cameras, new school sticker making polaroid cameras, instax cameras, and a cute little printer that works with smart phones. I missed the side demo on polaroid transfers. Not drawn artistically to this medium, but would love to have either the sticker polaroid or the little printer as a toy to amuse friends and family.
We also got a demo on scanning negatives. I then spent the day scanning on the side, was not happy with the speed nor with the results, and returned to spend another 2 plus hours scanning during lab. Found that the scanners need to be babysat, and nudged after each image is scanned. My preferred nudging method is to click on the epson scanner icon, because the scanner responds with a little sound that conjures up an image of R2D2 reacting to a loving little pinch. Moving the mouse also seems to work. Without nudging, the scanner will sit idle after each scan.
The one thing I could not figure out how to remedy is the fixed ration between height and width when scanning negatives. It is set to make slightly cropped impressions of 35 mm film in a 35 mm film holder. The cropping bothers me, and I did not notice it until the end, when examining a head shot of Coco where the tops of her cocked ears are slivered off.
I was not able to slightly increase the height dimension to include the full image. I was also not able to scan my square medium format slides for the very same reason, though, I did use the special medium format slide holder. There has to be a simple solution to this problem, as I observed an advanced student scanning medium format slides during Tuesday's developing lab two weeks ago. Will update next week when I find it. Update: easy fix. When viewing the scan preview, go to "normal" rather than "thumbnail" view. Then, use the marquee to define the desired boundaries. For the nicest scan, use 48 bit color, 4800 dpi rather than 16 bit grayscale. Will take up more space, but using RGB gets a richer range of black and white tonality.
Another problem that may admit a solution is that the scanner automatically turns the scanned negatives into positives. Which means I cannot avoid Photoshop. Is there anyway to keep the images as negatives? It just seems so inefficient to scan a negative, have it converted to a positive, and then have to reconvert it back to a negative using Photoshop. Update: in the epson scanner setup screen, there is an option to scan as a positive.
For both pragmatic and artistic reasons, I stuck to lith printing this week. One, I enjoy being in the darkroom. Two, as I only have one decent negative transparency and plenty of good old-fashioned negatives shot this spring in my black and white darkroom photography class, a process that uses the enlarger instead of contact printing enables me to efficiently print images other than mopey Coco of cyanotype and VDB fame. Three, I relish the personal control inherent in lith developing, choosing the precise moment when to stop the image from developing based on instantaneous visual input. Finally, I love the warm, brownish-black tones, creamy whites and the overall softness of the image. My classmate Fred said the prints reminded him of his albumen photos.
Other processes I worked with this week and notes, tips, tricks, and failures.
Did not work with any other process this week. However, I was not idle on the photography front....
Last weekend, I visited my husband, Eric, in Berkeley, CA. We went to Looking Glass Photo and Camera to purchase a roll of 120 film for my new old Tourist II, and to peruse their camera collection, which includes this whopper:
Back in Ann Arbor, and with an unexpected windfall of time due to the cancellation (sniff) of Wednesday's darkroom class, I visited the Argus factory museum. On display is an extensive collection of cameras spanning the life of this local company. Highlights for me were the case of twin lens reflex cameras and a photo montage tool called the "Jig-o-mat".
After visiting the Argus museum, I stopped at Camera Mall to check out their selection of old school photography supplies, and found out that they develop film every Tuesday evening! I have one roll of color film that I brought back from Berkeley from a found camera. The last 4 exposures are of Eric and Runty, our other dog, but the first twenty are a mystery. Until next Wednesday, that is...
Finally, when I got home, there was a package on my porch, containing a gift from my husband.
For the weekend, I have two rolls of 120, this lovely Minolta Autocord, and a Holga checked out from the lab. Loaded them up Friday night and took a few test shots on both cameras. On Thursday during class, we could not get the Autocord shutter to fire. It turns out that the shutter is cocked only when the film is advanced, and hence would not fire without any film in the camera.
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