Platinum Prints
Development and clearing
08.06.08
One‘s in the first clearing bath, one in the third. I need bigger trays!
Exposure
08.06.08
The sandwich of negative and paper being exposed under a bronzing lamp. When I put the camera down, I had some dodging to do!
Hangin‘ out
08.06.08
The coated paper drying. Sorry for the lack of sharpness, I was photographing in low light with Fujifilm Neopan 1600 handheld.
On the wet side
08.06.08
While the paper dries, I prepare the developer (two tablespoons of ammonium citrate on a half-litre mug of boiling water) and the clearing agent (EDTA, in the trays in the background). The solutions can cool off to manageable temperatures while I prepare and expose the contact print.
Stuff
08.06.08
The gloves (the whole thing is supposed to be poisonous ...), syringe, beaker, the solutions from B & S, the manual with the ratios for mixing them, paper an a well exposed piece of 8x10 film.
I had a notion of doing 8x10 inch contact prints in gorgeous platinum. Well, it don‘t always turn out that way ...
Bought a contact printing frame and chemicals from Bostick & Sullivan and paper and developer from Moersch Photochemie. Little graduated beakers (from cough sirup), a syringe and latex gloves were soon found. I proceeded according to the recipies that came with the materials, but tried to spread the emulsion on the paper with little glass tubes that were quite a bit shorter than the short side of 8x10. The result is down below at the left‘
Ugly!
The second attempt, with more emulsion and longer exposure wasn‘t much better:
Bad!
Two problems presented themselves: uneven spreading of the emulsion on the paper, and, with this negative (taken in a slit canyon near Eisenach) very different density.
So I contacted a glass blower and had two glass rods made with a handle in the middle. With these, even spreading was easy, and I even had too much emulsion with the recommendations in the Bostick & Sullivan manual for 8x10.
Finally, I did get something presentable (at left at the top):
Good (well, almost ...)
The tonality is not quite what I‘d whish for and I see some granulation in the upper right corner. Anyway, here‘s my process:
