Friday, December 12, 2014

Printing: Film, Through Digital, to Palladium

Some snaps from the darkroom. This week I've been working with pictures from my American Drive-in Theater project. As mentioned here a couple days ago, some of my 7x17 panoramic shots with expansive western skies benefit greatly from some corrective work in Photoshop/ACR. Yesterday, I made palladium prints from digital negatives, a bit larger than the originals.


Woodbury, Connecticut

I've found that Arches Platine, currently the most reliable paper available for Pt/Pd printing, won't work correctly without using the additive Tween20 in the solution. The combination, however, refuses to accept a perfectly even brush coating. The problem is subtle and doesn't show in most pictures, but 17.5" of perfectly clear California desert sky will show up the tiniest imperfections. So, for the first time in ten years or more, I've switched back to coating the paper with glass tubes or acrylic rods. This presents other problems because Tween makes the solution so runny that it's difficult to keep track of, I'm basically having to learn to coat with a tube all over again.


Prepared sheet and negative placed in the vacuum frame, waiting for the pressure to come up.




Starting the six minute exposure with the vac frame flipped up against the 20x24" UV exposure unit.



The Skyline Drive-in,  Barstow, California, in the first clearing bath.


The Comanche, Buena Vista, Colorado, and the Skyline, draining after final wash, before transfer to drying screens.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Carl! Thanks for the "behind the scenes" look here! Out of curiosity, what vacuum UV exposure unit are you using?

Keep up the great work!

Carl Weese said...

Jon, the UV box is from Edwards Engineering. The vac frame is a NuArc unit that was once part of a graphic arts plate-burner setup.