Liquid Light S.O.S.

Greetings. I need a bit of advice with an emulsion project I've got in the works and want to know if it's salvageable or how badly it's hosed.

Liquid Light semi-Fail

This is one of four 4x6 samples I made from scrap glass after I cut down the larger pieces for the actual project. I figured I should probably prep them the same way and use them as test plates since I had never worked with Liquid Light before or done anything quite like this. The process I used is as follows.

1) chemically clean glass by scrubbing with sodium carbonate laundry powder until water sheets off of both sides
2) use home-made gelatin glue (3tbs near boiling vinegar:1tsp knox gelatin powder) to glue sheer white fabric to the plate and smooth out any bubbles, wrinkles, etc before it sets
3) once thoroughly dry, take into the makeshift darkroom (windowless bathroom with lights outside the room turned off at night), heat Liquid Light and decant into a clean beaker with a little Photo Flo added to aid in spreading
4) pour onto plate and spread with a sponge brush to get an even coating, inspected closely under safelight
5) dry for 12+ hours in a blacked out closet on a drying rack
6) expose, then develop in working solution strength Dektol and fix in full strength Kodak Fixer

From the looks of the plate, I suspect I needed 1-2 more layers of Liquid Light and all of the dark spots are bubbles in the emulsion from the brushing/pouring/slow stirring in of Photo Flo. Does someone more experienced agree with my assessment? Is there anything I can do about it at this point? Will subsequent layers of Liquid Light 'fix' it? Will the bubbles in the base layer show up after 1-2 more layers over top of the original coat, or will they just blend in with the additional layers? Is there a 'better' way to spread the emulsion besides a sponge brush that wont' leave streaks or waste emulsion? I was attempting to follow the initial suggestion of pouring in the center and tilting around to coat evenly, but my plates are too large and awkwardly sized to make that easy (three 12x18, one 14x24 that has a triptych of 2x 5x7.5 and one 8x12). I'm starting an advanced film photography class in a week and a half and the professor does these kinds of alt-process projects with the advanced class; will my unexposed plates keep for a couple weeks, or do I need to figure out something to attempt sooner than that to avoid fogging?

I'm hoping there's some way to get a bolder image and get rid of/cover up/mitigate the bubbles in the first layer. The shoot that was getting printed on these plates was a boudoir shoot, and I think printing them on the sheer fabric will really work well, I just don't want it to be quite -that- ghostly...lol.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

hi brokenglytch

i have gotten bubbles like that with and without a tiny bit of photoflo
they might stop if you using sponge brushes. you might consider pouring the emulsion
from your beaker directly on your warmed plate and have the emulsion flow to each corner
and then off of a corner into a catch-vessel. when i started pouring plates like that, i got fewer bubbles.

also, i've never heard of using vinegar as a base for gelatin sub layers. when i used gelatin
i mixed it with water and that was it. i'm not sure how to get rid of the bubbles you have in your current plates.

you might consider taking a few small plates coat them exactly the same .. same sub layer, same pour, same sponge brush
and test heating the glass and seeing if you can somehow flow more emulsion on re'heated glass.

i've done that before. it might help .. but then again i never had vinegar in my sub layer (which is like stop bath)
it may mix into the gelatin of your emulsion and screw things up even more ...

you might call rockland colloid and ask what they recommend doing, if anything to fix your problems.

sorry for not being much help ...

I hadn't thought of that; stop bath -is- vinegar...acetic acid. Considering the tone on what I have, I don't think that caused any problems, and the dektol processed several sheets of photo paper after exposure to the plate so I don't think it neutralized anything. The glue is supposedly waterproof as long as you don't heat it above ~120F...you can melt it off with hot water from the tap. The same is probably true of using water in the sub layer, but I wasn't sure how well it would hold the fabric to the plate, whereas I knew the glue would do the trick; it's good for gluing anything to glass, including other glass, fabrics, paper, etc.

The only concern I had with pouring is that with the size of my plates, it's going to be a) very messy and b) waste a lot of Liquid Light, but it might just be what I have to do I suppose. Probably should have worked with smaller plates for my first project...lol.

Any experience with covering a bubbly layer with another layer? Will the bubbles show through (read: are my plates jacked and in need of being redone from the beginning?)

Is there such a thing as 'too thick' for Liquid Light? For the plate with the triptych, pouring will end up with LL streaks on what should be bare glass...it should peel off anywhere there wasn't gelatin I guess, but that seems wasteful. Could just be I'm too new to the process and need to get over it; if that's the case, please send my reality check at your soonest convenience...lol

Filtering through a gold coffee filter should eliminate most of the bubbles. The streaks and some of the bubbles come from the foam brush. I have never gotten a good coating that way. Pouring onto a glass plate is the only remedy in my experience, and even then it is more difficult on the substrate you have chosen.

Multiple layers of emulsion should help, but a thicker pour might as well.

PE

I had a thought earlier this morning that I wanted to run by you as well now that I think about it again. Would degassing the liquid emulsion cause any problems with it? It seemed fairly thin once it was melted, so it shouldn't be that difficult to do from a physics standpoint. I've been looking for another excuse to buy a lab-grade vacuum desiccator so I could start working with epoxy resins for sculpture and gallery grade art finishing (photographic and painting). If this would pull the bubbles out without altering the emulsion in some way, I could just about justify the purchase of the setup. I'd wager it'd be a bit better than filtering through a coffee filter in terms of time and efficiency. 2 minutes or less to degas, then pour directly onto the plate and just deal with any waste as a necessary cost of doing this kind of photography...

brokenglytch said:

I hadn't thought of that; stop bath -is- vinegar...acetic acid. Considering the tone on what I have, I don't think that caused any problems, and the dektol processed several sheets of photo paper after exposure to the plate so I don't think it neutralized anything. The glue is supposedly waterproof as long as you don't heat it above ~120F...you can melt it off with hot water from the tap. The same is probably true of using water in the sub layer, but I wasn't sure how well it would hold the fabric to the plate, whereas I knew the glue would do the trick; it's good for gluing anything to glass, including other glass, fabrics, paper, etc.

The only concern I had with pouring is that with the size of my plates, it's going to be a) very messy and b) waste a lot of Liquid Light, but it might just be what I have to do I suppose. Probably should have worked with smaller plates for my first project...lol.

Any experience with covering a bubbly layer with another layer? Will the bubbles show through (read: are my plates jacked and in need of being redone from the beginning?)

Is there such a thing as 'too thick' for Liquid Light? For the plate with the triptych, pouring will end up with LL streaks on what should be bare glass...it should peel off anywhere there wasn't gelatin I guess, but that seems wasteful. Could just be I'm too new to the process and need to get over it; if that's the case, please send my reality check at your soonest convenience...lol

Click to expand...

once you get the hang of it, pouring plates is not very hard or too messy
start small to get the hang of it then go bigger. i've double coated plates this way
the 2nd coat always goes on easier and faster &c.
go to youtube and watch videos on coating wet plates with collodion, its the same thing as what you will need to do.
i'd get rid of the vinegar. and i'd follow what PE said above. gold coffee filters aren't too expensive
and they are probably available at your local pharmacy ... no idea about de-gasing, ive never heard of that.

too thick? i've double poured ( as i mentioned ) never had trouble.

as for the plates you currently have poured,chalk it up to experence and move on ?

good luck

john

Degassing is used before machine coatings are made. There is no problem with it.

The acetic acid should evaporate as the undercoat dries. If you smell any, it is there, otherwise there should be no problem.

PE

Thanks for the feedback guys. Really helping to educate and ease my mind. PE, any thoughts on whether I can recoat the current plates and even out the streaks/bubble spots, or should I just look at getting the vacuum setup / coffee filter going first and start again from scratch?

You can recoat to test for density increase with double or triple coating and you can recoat to test if you have reduced bubbles. The bubbles there will remain.

PE

brokenglytch said:

heat Liquid Light and decant into a clean beaker

Click to expand...

Repeated heating of an emulsion will (according to the literature) increases the fog levels. You might want to do what I do - With a plastic knife, chop up the solid emulsion in the bottle and shake the bits out into another container. Heat these lumps up and pour off the quantity you need. Do not return the melted emulsion to the original bottle, just pop it inside a black plastic bag (the type paper/sheet film comes in) and store it on the top shelf of the fridge.

Actually, you can melt it all once and put it into a ceramic pot or a wide mouth jar and rechill it. Then just open the container of solid gelatin and spoon out what you need using weight as your guide. Then you only have 1 container. I use a bottle company which sells light tight containers and also containers that are insulated so that they stay cold (or hot) for a long time.

PE

Photo Engineer, can you provide a link to that company's site? That sounds like a great option to me, and after paul_c5x4's suggestion I was thinking of something along those lines going forward.

I hate to single out one company, but I use Freund Container and Supply.

freundcontainer.com, 800-363-9822.

PE