It seems like everyone is loving on salt prints lately! In the last few days Christina Z. Anderson and J. Keith Schreiber have posted some very in-depth and interesting material about salt on the Alternative Processes Facebook group. Really, Spiders, that's a great place to be if you're working in alt processes.
Christina Z. Anderson's post (HERE) was about the fancy-schmancy new paper by Hahnemühle: Platinum Rag. It's designed for (duh) platinum printing, but also produces good results for all manner of other processes. Diana Bloomfield used it to do a multi-layer gum print without any additional sizing! That's pretty impressive. Aside from the coolness of this (expensive) new paper, I enjoyed seeing someone else doing the same kind of rigorous testing that I'm doing with chemistry. The difference between gelatinized and non-gelatinzied paper is something I'm also going to end up testing, too.
Keith Schreiber's post (HERE) is more a general thing about salt printing. He talks about how it can have an even longer tonal range than platnium printing, which I didn't actually know. Kinda makes me wonder what the point of platinum is, since everyone always gushes about it's incredible tonal range. Plus, at the end of his post, he links a Salt Printing PDF from a printer working at the Fox Talbot Museum. More fun things to study! I also like that he provides very clear examples of various toning effects. It's nice to see well-documented information. I feel that's a big downside to the book by Christopher James. He gives examples of toned photographs, or variations on a process, but he doesn't provide (often probably can't, since he sources his examples from numerous other artists) side-by-side examples so you can see the difference between Approach A and Approach B. That side-by-side is hugely important to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment