I’ve done what I can to mentally manage this expectation.
It's going to take a lot longer and cost more in materials than you ever expected, before you get to a reasonable print.
The best nugget of wisdom I can offer you is this: buy the Kallitype book by Don Nelson. There will be no unanswered questions if you follow this bit of advice.
When I proposed to start Kallitypes along time ago, I was advised to start with VDB's, that I did and never progressed any further. VDB is easier and more affordable and so far I haven't seen anything in Kallitype or for that matter P/P to make me want to try either.
I second VDB as the preferred path, if it's feasible. Kallitype is more flexible in terms of contrast, which makes it a better choice for film negs. With digital negs, VDB is the way to go.
My single nugget of kallitype advice: stick with sodium citrate developer. Clearing will be you biggest problem, and citrate developers are your best. option on that front.
As Andy has pointed out, it is critically important to engineer a negative of the correct density/contrast to work well with Kallitype. You can either make a digital negative (you have to work with Epson printer tech for this) or work out a process to create an in-camera negative, which requires special processing. (For this I recommend Ellie Young's pdf, which goes into considerable detail about achieving the correct negative density) Your best option for in-camera alt process negatives is FP4+, which is ideally suited to making Kallitype (and Salt) negs because of its low base + fog density. Ellie explains the choice of FP4+ in the pdf, so do yourself a favor and take a look at it.
Andy's recommendation to stick to an appropriate paper is also excellent advice. To his list of Revere and Hahnemuhle I would add Bergger's COT 320 paper, which has been my favorite for Salted paper and Kallitype printmaking.
Tone your prints before fixing. Gold chloride toning is considered the best for archival and aesthetic purposes. You can buy a gram of Gold chloride for about half what it would cost you to buy gold toner pre-made: go to ArtCraft Chemicals. The Thiocyanate toner version of Gold toner is simplest and very easy to make yourself.
Yes!!! You will need a negative with much greater density in the highlight values.Is the density/curve process far different than for cyanotypes?
Yes!!! You will need a negative with much greater density in the highlight values.
Are you saying that the blacks(highlights) need to be more dense(blacker) here?
Toning Cyanotype prints with coffee/tea/tannic acid etc has the nice effect of reducing the harshness of blown out highlights, reducing contrast and sometimes making such highlights very attractive due to the stain imparted by the toner. Kallitype will be less kind with detail-less highlights and increasing density of highlights in the digital negative won't help much in this case. This is of course assuming that the highlights are detail-less as hinted by a cursory check of highlight values of the negative image shared above.
I would recommend working the other way around:Exposure times are FAST, at least for the new image/negative I chose
When I started doing Van Dyke (which is conceptually similar to Kallitype), I tried dichromate as well to boost contrast. Long story short - I find (like many others) that the best way to fix the contrast of the print is in making sure the negative is suitable for the process, and then to not use anything in the chemistry to raise contrast.
I would recommend working the other way around:
1: Determine the minimum exposure time needed to render a good dmax/black through your printing frame and a blank strip of your (inkjet/silver gelatin) film. Then use this exposure time, and nothing shorter, for consecutive prints.
2: Now determine the contrast you need to print paper white with the exposure time determined in #1. This can be done e.g. with a stouffer step tablet if you're shooting camera negatives, or print a step tablet with your inkjet printer using different ink loads and perhaps ink channels to determine the ink load & combination that gives the required coverage.
3: If you're using inkjet negatives, linearize the curve by printing a step tablet and using measurements from the print to build a compensation curve.
I know it's seductive to do things differently; e.g. create a negative that looks OK to your eye and then try and make the best print from it. We generally get away with this in regular darkroom printing where we can use variable contrast paper and all manner of tricks & tweaks to control contrast. But with processes like kallitype, we have a lot fewer tricks at our disposal and the tricks we do have, too often come with severe implications for e.g. the density of the maximum black you can print or image hue/tone.
That looks pretty good, really. Nicely done!
You converted it to B&W digitally I assume?
There's a minor issue with your contact printing frame you might want to look into.
This is usually imperfect contact between the negative and the paper during exposure. What kind of contact frame/setup are you using?I'm not certain what caused that at the bottom of the print, as my print(of the same negative) prior didn't suffer from that.
There's very little to improve, I'd say! Keep at it; if you're having fun to boot, I know what you'll be doing a lot this winter!
This is usually imperfect contact between the negative and the paper during exposure. What kind of contact frame/setup are you using?
Are all sodium citrates available online, say on Amazon, essentially the same?
I can't comment on that; I do know that citric acid is a reasonably good chelating agent. Whether it's necessarily better than EDTA in this application I couldn't say.I'm also reading that 3% citric acid solution may perform better at clearing than the EDTA found in my kit.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?