Lions at Mission San Xavier del Bac, Arizona, 1992

Very good !

totally cool-always wanted to try salt printing and now I might....peter

Very nice Vaughn. Are you hooked?

Was this negative originally made for carbon printing? I ask because I'm curious about the negative density range.

Joe

Great job Vaughn! I did a little bit of salt printing a while back but I've been working on getting some other equipment repaired and re-calibrating to Pyrocat-HD. Once this is done, back to the salt mines!

A wonderfully simple process, isn't it!

Joe, No, I made this negative just after I began to experiment with carbon...and had not yet bumped up the developing for carbon negs yet. I had just gotten the 5x7 back and really enjoying the proportions...I had gone from a 2 1/4 square to 4x5...and never had used 35mm.

I had exposed the sides of the lions (shaded) on Zone VI, almost Zone V, and pretty much let the desert scene behind the lions care of itself (up to Zone X or so) The yellow filter helped out there, too. This was before I kept development records, but I was using HC-110 at the time, tray developing, and times were around "normal". It makes a very nice silver gelatin contact, but still seemed to have enough punch of salt printing. For platinum/palladium printing, I would probably use a little contrast agent to boost the contrast...normally I don't.

rw-- Yes it is simple...but not any simpler that platinum/palladium prints is. But the class went through 25 grams of silver nitrate. At only $30, that allowed more free use of the chemicals than if the class had used platinum! But then we did not gold-tone either! But salt printing is forgivable, and I can see where it would be more fun to jump into than platinum printing -- with pt, I feel that I must be so accurate with everything, and the prints must be so pristine.

We'll see if I explore this process again. I can see where there can be a lot of fine-tuning of the process. There is a possibility I will teach a class in alt photo next year and salt printing seems to be a natural...along with the history behind the process...for the class.