Anyone tried a "tartaric acid print"?

nmp · Jul 2, 2018

NedL said:
you got a nice print out of whatever happened!

+1

NedL · Jul 4, 2018

Today I mixed up a few drops to make a solution that was 10% acetic acid and 12% silver nitrate. Painted it onto the tartaric acid paper, and it didn't reduce immediately so I thought "Aha! Now I'll see what Pdeeh saw.". I looked at it after about 10 minutes and it still looked clean... but after an hour it had dried and turned a weak, sort of gritty looking ugly brown color. When I took it out into the sun, it didn't change.

pdeeh · Jul 5, 2018

I really must try to do some properly systematic work on this rather than dicking about in a half-arsed way.

By the way, I've been fixing everything recently in ordinary rapid fixer at paper strength (1+9) and I can't see any difference in colour or bleaching effect from using plain hypo (at ~10%) for either the tartaric-ey prints or proper Namias.

Why just about every alt-process text warns against rapid fix is becoming more puzzling - did someone try it once, get a bad result, and somehow that became gospel ?

removed account4 · Jul 5, 2018

pdeeh said:
Moral: Making prints without any idea of how to repeat the results because reasons, is fun.

Dead Link Removed

YES + YUM!

NedL · Jul 9, 2018

OK well I'm completely confused ( what else is new? ). That one I tried with 10% acetic & 12% AgNO3, after I took it into the sun and it didn't change, I just put it back in my closet. Yesterday I noticed the silver was all reduced -- must have happened when it finished drying. Even darker than the first one. I have no idea what's going on with it. Also, I know that some people have used oxalic acid, acetic acid or tartaric acid instead of citric to restrain spontaneous fogging on salt prints... so what I'm seeing doesn't make any sense from that POV either. Maybe the tartaric acid is reacting with some specific thing in the paper I'm using.

pdeeh · Jul 10, 2018

I really must give it another go with the aceto-nitrate. I'll see if I can do it tomorrow

pdeeh · Jul 11, 2018

Well, I know that "That didn't happen for me" is rarely useful ... but that didn't happen for me.

I put a couple of drops of 20% acetic acid into 1ml or so of 12% nitrate and coated a tarty bit of paper. Then the sun disappeared for the rest of the day for the first time in weeks.
Timing.
Gave half of it about 20 mins under the cloudy skies with a reasonably dense & contrsty negative = only a faint image.
Stuck the other half away in a box, just checked it ~14 hours later - no change in colour at all.

NedL · Jul 11, 2018

You would laugh if you could see all the dropper bottles I've managed to fill. Now I need to buy more so I can make a tartaric acid one. I'll try a different paper this weekend...

pdeeh · Jul 13, 2018

Well the sun came out for a while, before we had this weird phenomenon this afternoon of water apparently condensing out of the air and falling from the sky for 40 minutes. Doubt that'll happen again in my lifetime.

So, stuck out my scrap of agno3tartypaper (which was still perfectly untainted after a couple of days) under a nice negative and checked it every 7m 2s. After four rounds of that we had a print, a bit low contrast and probably needing another 14m 4s but I was bored waiting so I washed it and fixed it.

Tonally quite nice, more salt print than Namias, but not really sure I want to make much more of an effort trying to establish what the "sweet spot" of nitrate/acetic ratios is.

I might play some more with Namias over tartaric paper tho'.

(Possible next thing to try: Winther direct-positive on glass )

Anyone tried a "tartaric acid print"?

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