Couple questions regarding bleaching, cane sugar and Ralph Steiner

[Jim Chinn]

I stumbled upon a book at the used bookstore that had a number of Ralph Steiner's cloud imges. ( Some of my favorite images) It said he used a special alkaline bleach for the prints. After searching through books and magazines I found the supposed recipe in Tim Rudman's Master Printing Course.

Basically a three part solution, A= hypo, B= 10% sodium hydroxide, C=potassium ferricyanide.

Rudman says that Steiner recommended adding "cane sugar" to solution A+B before adding to solution C.

For the chemists out there what is the purpose of adding the cane sugar and what if any is the advantage to using sodium hydroxide in the bleaching bath?

 

[clay]

Cane sugar is sometimes used in small quantities in wet-plate collodion ferrous sulfate developers to retard development a little bit in hot muggy weather. I heard an explanation about why this works from Mark Osterman, but it did not stick. So I guess what I am saying is - the use of sugar has a history - and it apparently serves some purpose to slow things down.

 

[gainer]

It has also been used simply to increase viscosity, to make it less "runny", which might be the purpose here. I tried it long ago in the first bath of a two bath developer with the idea that it would be somewhat like the Kodak Viscomat process, where a viscous developing bath is used. I guess nothing much came of my experiment or I would remember what came of it.

 

[nworth]

Nobody said how much cane sugar is added. My guess is that the purpose is increased viscosity and that a quite a bit is used. It might be usedful if you want to carefully control what area is wetted by the solution.

Chemically, I can't see much purpose. But I'm not much of a chemist. Cane sugar (sucrose) is a dimeric cabohyrate. That means there are a couple of aldehyde groups and a bunch of alcoholic hydroxyls along an aliphatic carbon chain. Ho hum. I've seen it used to retard development in the first bath of a divided developer (Kodak), and it's the (weak) reducing agent in the Rochelle salt method of mirror silvering. A nice quality is that it is miscible (not quite the same as soluble) in all proportions with water, but that also makes it hard to get rid of. Other than that, I can't recall anything related.

 

[wfwhitaker]

For the chemists out there what is the purpose of adding the cane sugar...?

It makes it taste much better.

 

[gainer]

Which is a big comfort as you're on your way to the mortuary.

 

[Claire Senft]

David Vestal edited an article called "Print Brillancing" written by Ralph Steiner in Photo Technques magzine. Steiner he results. was adding the sugar to slow down the action of the bleach.