Thursday, March 6, 2014

Blogging for Thor: My Discontent with Winter

Much to my discontent, it remains firmly winter here in the South. Near-freezing temperatures, grey skies and cold liquids falling from space. It all sucks, my spiders. Get working on the NASA satellite weather-control thing, will you?

Tonight's blog will be brief. I haven't been entirely unproductive recently. Teaching a darkroom class has actually had me in the darkroom. I'm not a big fan, especially since I was basically just watching my students do their thing until I was able to change the policy to get them an open-door lab. One of the advantages of just sitting around while my students worked was that I had time to mix myself up a batch of fixer and test some more lumen papers.

Before and after: Ilford Warmtone
As normal, warm-tone paper (I got a pack of Ilford Warmtone for my birthday back in December) continues to be really awesome when fixed. The relatively boring purple of pre-fixer changes to a nice gradient of red-golds. So far, since everything is dead and dry, I have not been able to test the effects of moisture on the Ilford Warmtone, but I look forward to doing that during spring.

The second paper I tested was the Harman Direct Positive, which is bubblegum pink when taken out of the pack and exposes down to a dull slate-grey. It takes forever to expose, several days which is unheard of for a lumen print. When fixed, anything that stayed pink just washes right off and goes to pure white, but the grey areas turn a very soft, pastel peach. I think it might be worth pushing this paper further to see what can be achieved there.
Before and after: Harman Direct Positive

I also experimented with fixing some of my Liquid Light lumens that were made on metal, glass or animal skin. The results weren't as cool as I hoped. When fixed, Liquid Light goes from a dull purple-grey to a dull tan. It's not very exciting. I'm having trouble scanning them, because the fixer bath and rinse left them very delicate and extremely warped. I may have to photograph them.

No comments:

Post a Comment