Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Photographers Equinox.

Tap water running 68 degrees out of the cold side this morning in the darkroom. Actually processed a roll of HP5 that I shot in the Hasselblad yesterday. And made a few prints in the afternoon. Always nice to be in the darkroom.

Was printing some contact prints of Cat Woman on Ilford Warmtone Multigrade. I use my Aristo Grid-headed Omega. I wonder if the light color is influencing the filter color? I think I remember a discussion about this. Just started using graded papers and have the Kodak filters, the Ilford filters and the Bestler filter sets. The negative is too contrasty for anything but Palladium so I doubled the dilution of the developer, Zonal Pro, from 1:9 to 1:18, lengthened the development time to about 4 minutes and used a 1/2 Iford filter. It made a difference and looked good but the proof will be in the prints after I look at them for a bit.

2 comments:

Mark Kalan said...

It's been a long time but I too recalled learning something about the color of cold light heads effecting multi-contrast papers so I did some research and found out that YES - the blue spectrum of the cold light does affect VC papers making it difficult to lower the contrast. you did good trying to dilute the developer. I know its expensive to stock all the multiple grades of paper but that's what I would recommend - especially for your exhibition/sale prints.

Robert Langham said...

Kodak filters are worthless, but the Ilford filters are good at least on the D6 5X7 enlarger. Not so good on the Aristo0grid headed D2. Hmmmmm.