The professor of our advance photo class (which meets every Friday, 8am -2pm) asked me to buy supplies (silver nitrate, sea salt, paper and brushes) for a day of salted print making.
So being an alt photo sort of guy and never having made salt prints before, I read up on the process, order the supplies, and the night before the class whipped up a gelatin, sodium citrate and ammoniun chloride solution and soaked about 16 sheets of Crane's Kid Finish, just to get a sort of a head start for the next day. I fretted about how to get organized for 22 students to make good salt prints over a four hour period.
Turned out the prof had a more simpler plan -- coat the paper by brush with sea salt solution (1 tablespoon per liter), use hair driers to dry that, coat with silver nitrate solution, dry and print.
I did sneak some sodium citrate into the salt solution and some sea salt into the first rinse (he was going to use just tap water). After another rinse, the paper went into the 10% hypo then a wash.
Students used camera negatives, enlarged negatives, cut out magazine images, drawings, made photograms anr/or combinations of all the above.
The point is, is that the students had a blast, they got images, and they were introduced to something beyond store-bought photopaper and inkjet images. Who knows how well the prints were cleared and fixed, how long they will last, et al.
Sometimes it is just suppose to be fun.
Vaughn
So being an alt photo sort of guy and never having made salt prints before, I read up on the process, order the supplies, and the night before the class whipped up a gelatin, sodium citrate and ammoniun chloride solution and soaked about 16 sheets of Crane's Kid Finish, just to get a sort of a head start for the next day. I fretted about how to get organized for 22 students to make good salt prints over a four hour period.
Turned out the prof had a more simpler plan -- coat the paper by brush with sea salt solution (1 tablespoon per liter), use hair driers to dry that, coat with silver nitrate solution, dry and print.
I did sneak some sodium citrate into the salt solution and some sea salt into the first rinse (he was going to use just tap water). After another rinse, the paper went into the 10% hypo then a wash.
Students used camera negatives, enlarged negatives, cut out magazine images, drawings, made photograms anr/or combinations of all the above.
The point is, is that the students had a blast, they got images, and they were introduced to something beyond store-bought photopaper and inkjet images. Who knows how well the prints were cleared and fixed, how long they will last, et al.
Sometimes it is just suppose to be fun.
Vaughn
