beeswax doesn't penetrate paper negative

I tried salt printing with Adorama paper negative for several hours in full sun with barely an exposure. Then I tried rubbing the paper backing with hot beeswax and it doesn't penetrate at all. Do I just need to convert to any fiber based paper instead of VC paper? Adox or Fomatone? Now I've got about 80 sheets of Adorama Pearl 5x7 that is only good for scanning or contact printing but no alt photography.

hi ian

im sorry i am not familiar with the adorama paper you are using, is it FB ?
what i do, with paraffin, will be the same thing with bee's wax
i take a metal tray, and put it on your stove with the heat on low so it heats up nice
and hot ... you take the print you rubbed the bees wax on and you put it on the metal tray
so it melts into the paper. heat low, not very hot
you will see the wax penetrating the negative ( rub it well to get excess off ) ... but the paper isn't single weight
which will be troublesome because the paper is thicker ... can you get "slavish" single weight paper ?
for a long time they were the last place making it ... azo was the 2nd to last .. if you can find some azo
even OLD azo it will be good. do a test-strip exposure starting at iso 1 ( about 7 stops slower than regular paper )
use that for your paper negative, its like salted emulsion in gelatin ( silver chloride ).
when i make waxed negatives i use paraffin and either butcher paper or "velum" its on a pad or converted from
a digital file on a sheet of xerox paper ... the wax goes right through it and makes it pretty see through
double weight paper will work but it will take a lot of sun ...

Hi Ian,

I use Adorama VC RC paper negatives to make salt prints quite often.
I doubt they will take wax, but you should be able to make nice salt prints without waxing them.
IMHO, even if you could wax them it would be better not to, because you end up with better contrast control and the paper has no objectionable texture at all.

The main exposure in full sun is usually right around an hour.

Depending on the negative, I sometimes start it with an hour or two in "open shade" aimed up at the sky away from the sun. This open shade exposure will increase contrast and let you get darker darks before the sky or highlights start to get tone. The extra "open sky" exposure is also useful if you've preflashed the paper negative or used a yellow filter to reduce contrast. The adorama paper is quite good for salt printing if you use it "as is" without filters or pre-flashing.

But don't worry about "open sky" until you're getting decent prints with an hour of full sun.

It's awful hard to offer advice about alt printing on the internet, because there are so many details that matter, but possibly your paper negative is overexposed. For salt printing, It should run the full range from almost paper white to deep dark black....
Also, you can test your salt print by making a photogram to make sure it prints in vigorously.

Good luck and have fun!

I make them winter and summer, about an hour either way, sometimes 45 minutes in the summer.

A good negative for salt printing would be difficult to make a contact print from ( not sure about scanning)... contrast is probably the wrong word, but you want the dark areas on the negative ( usually sky, if it's an outdoors photo ) to be dense enough so that they don't print in too soon. A common problem with salt prints is lack of contrast because the negative doesn't have enough density range.... which is one reason paper negatives work so well for them!

Here's one that was exposed specifically to make a salt print, you can see when I scanned/inverted, it still seems "contrasty".

10 minutes for the dark chocolate color around the negative actually sounds kind of long to me. It should be pretty dark after 2 or 3 minutes.

I don't do anything special... plain salted paper ( +/- a little CA or gelatin ) and coat with 12% silver nitrate + however much CA I need to reduce fogging, usually around 5%.

Have fun with it. It is my favorite thing to do in photography. I have one exposing in the contact frame right now!