I spent yesterday afternoon and evening in my basement dim room. After my recent flirtation with cuprotype*, I have returned to making prints on salted-paper. I made three useful prints.
The three exposures shown here were made in December. The first is another view of Mount Monadnock and Silver Lake from Leadmine Road in Nelson. (I am still working to get the ‘perfect’ exposure of this scene, but this one is pretty good.)
The second exposure is an example of the adage which circulates among landscape photographers… i.e. “Remember to look behind you.” The rock outcropping in this photo was off to the right near the camera when I made the first exposure.
I have probably made as many exposures of the outcropping as I have the grand view of the lake and mountain. However, the light on the out cropping is really only nice in the morning. Whereas, I think one can make nice photos of the grand view in either morning or evening light.
The third print is of a new (to me!) barn in Harrisville. One my way home from a previous trip to Nelson, I followed another landscape photographer’s adage… i.e. “Turn down any dirt road you come across.” Many times these are just roads through the woods with nothing of particular photographic interest. Sometimes, though, you find interesting barns!
The first print is my standard ‘large’ size (a 6×7 .5 inch image on 8×10 inch paper). The other two are 4×5 inch images on 6×7.5 inch paper; my standard small print.
All these prints were made on Legion Revere Platinum paper. This paper is specifically made for alt process printing and is somewhat less expensive than the Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag I usually use**. So far, I am liking this paper a lot except for the shipping***.
The odd paper size for small prints comes from the way I cut up large sheets of paper. It is my habit to buy paper in large sheets; 22×30 inch sheets are a common size. This allows me the most flexibility in sheet size for various project. However, my standard way to cut up the large sheets yields six 8×10 inch sheets and four 6×7.5 inch sheets from a 22×30 inch sheet with zero waste.
Enough technical talk! Here are the prints:
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* I’m tempted to return to cuprotype in the near future. There have been some interesting developments in the ferricyanide toning step yielding cleaner highlights. I also want to perfect cuprotype on cloth.
** The Revere Platinum is about sixty percent the cost of the Platinum Rag. Otherwise the two papers are quite comparable. They are both heavy (300/310 gsm) smooth, bright white and contain no carbonate buffers. The last feature is important for most alt process printing. When one uses papers not specially made for alt process printing you need to pre-treat papers to remove the carbonate present in most watercolor or printmaking papers. This is not difficult but it adds an additional step to the process.
*** I buy most of my paper from a small company (Acuity Papers) that sells only art paper. When I say ‘small’, I mean ‘small’. As far as I know the company consists of two brothers. Anyway, these folks really know how to package large sheets of paper so that they are not damaged in shipping. However, they do not stock the Revere Platinum.
Thus, I ordered the Revere Platinum from B&H Photo, a large, well-known photography/camera store in New York City. B&H is a great company to buy from. However, they clearly know very little about safely shipping large sheets of fragile paper.
For the first shipment, the package of 22×30 inch sheets was rolled up and stuffed into a nine inch square (by roughly 40 inch long) box. The entire stack of paper was crimped as it was carelessly rolled up. Furthermore, the plastic wrapper was torn and tattered. B&H, to their credit, were very easy to deal with and issued a RMA including a prepaid shipping label quickly. Of course I had to wait for them to receive the return and resend another package. They took my complaint to heart and shipped the second package of paper flat. I’ll spare you the details (which included FedEx misdirecting the package) but it arrived in barely acceptable condition. I am hoping to convince Acuity to stock then Revere Platinum by the time I need more!
