Monday, September 9, 2013

An Illumenated Manuscript

Kodak Ektacolor Ultra II
One of the really nice things about the Light Factory is that they have a huge supply of donated packs of paper. When people donate photo paper, it's for a lot of reasons. Maybe they're shutting down their dark room, or cleaning out to make new space. The general commonality is that people donate things they don't want anymore. And guess what? That stuff is generally old.

The result is a cabinet full of donated paper tends to be full of old paper. Expired paper, paper that has been discontinued, paper from brands no longer in existence and other exciting types. The Light Factory only has a little bit of Ilford and Kentmere, but they have a lot of old Kodak paper, some Agfa, a few types of old Bromide-based paper and some brands I've never heard of before like Luminos.

Luminos Portrait Delux
Since I'm teaching alternative process workshops at the Light Factory, I was able to take samples of the different types of paper they had and start making some lumen prints with them. It helps my workshops because I can choose the right kind of paper for desired end results without just wildly guessing. Now that I've gotten these samples and made my test exposures, I have a general idea of what a final lumen print will look like from different types of paper available at the Light Factory. Some of the papers came out really cool, others are really boring and by experimenting I found that some of the boxes of paper are just flat out worthless for anything except lumens. They're so old that they've become heat-fogged or chemically exposed. Put them in developer and they just turn black.

Now that I have these test samples, I've begun thinking. What else can I do with them? It's hard to set up a simple table of "use X paper for Y result" because lumens don't really work that way. The resulting colors are dependent on exposure time, humidity, type of object used to make the print and (apparently) magical faeries. Still, there are general trends. So while I can't do a simple 1:1 table, I can write some notes about what to generally expect from each type of paper. Not just for the paper from the Light Factory, but from the dozen or so brands of paper that I've used on my own.

Agfa Multicontrast Classic
Thus, the title of this post. I'm starting work on a sort of Lumen Print Codex. In facing page spreads, I'll have 1-2 examples of what lumens made from a specific type of paper look like, and then text describing the results in more detail and giving the general steps required to get different results. I can even add in an appendix about getting different colors by, say, exposing the prints with wet paper or submerged in water. If I get really ambitious, I might do a series of tests that I fully intend to fix, and include results on what that paper looks like both before and after fixing. I might not be a big fan of fixing lumen prints, but some people really are.


If you want to see all the lumen tests from Light Factory paper, you can check my Flickr Set: Lumen Prints. Anything done on Light Factory paper is marked as Lumen # LF. Currently, that's 102-113. I still have test sheets to work with, but all the different brands have been tested at least once. Here's the Link.

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