Lodima Fine Art Paper--Official reports and Member Responses

Shawn Dougherty said:

The paper arrived this morning. Thank you Michael and Paula!!!

I'll be sure to post some print scans in the gallery this weekend.

Shawn

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ditto

got mine just now!

eddie gunks said:

got mine just now!

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Same here

Me too.

My daughter says that there's a package waiting for me at home from Smith / Chamlee photography...I wonder what that can be

UPS truck just blew by going 1000 miles per hour. Not today.

Mine came, but damn!--I need to get some amidol and the other 800 essential ingredients for this paper's princely bath.

Barry S said:

Mine came, but damn!--I need to get some amidol and the other 800 essential ingredients for this paper's princely bath.

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I live in Gaithersburg. What do you need? I have pounds of everything (as in hypo, amidol, KBr, Na bisulfite, citric acid and Na sulfite). You'll have to fend for yourself on the rest.

Mine came, but damn!--I need to get some amidol and the other 800 essential ingredients for this paper's princely bath.

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You have been waiting for this paper and have no soup to cook it in?????
Time to get your life in order


jan

UPS came, but all they had for me was my Amazon order. Still, at least I have the weekend to go through my new copy of 'Bromoil, A Foundation Course'.

Jim--wow, thanks for the kind offer. I'll definitely take you up on it and will PM you about finding a time.

Jan--Sorry, my priorities are clearly mixed up.

There's hope for you Barry

NYC has Lodima.

Made my first prints on Lodima tonight. Overall, very pleased. While it shares many of Azo's characteristics, this is a unique product in its own right. Initial observations: Slow, but seemed faster than Azo, responds very well to water bath, double weight (but doesn't seem as thick to me as other DW papers), essentially neutral in tone, semi glossy surface, very long scale, great blacks. All the prints I made tonight were new negatives that I hadn't printed on Azo before so it's tough for me to make a direct comparison - they're in the wash now so I haven't seen them dried down, either. However, judging strictly on tonight's printing experience, I'd say Lodima is exactly what we all expected from M and P - a beautiful silver chloride paper that rivals anything else on on the market today for contact printing. Congratulations to them both for pulling this off!

Scott,

I cross posted your post to the Azo Forum.

My 1st impressions are posted there.

Since the paper is now available, I've merged Michael Smith's earlier status reports into one thread for those who want to read back over the history.

It looks like I merged more threads than I had intended to, including the latest update, which I had intended to keep separate, but it's all one continuous history now in one place. I'll update the title.

curious just how "semi" gloss is it. Is it more on the matt side or more on the gloss side?
Dennis

Do these recent deliveries give anyone an idea to when Lodima may be available to the general public and where?

Here's the statement on Michael and Paula's site--

http://www.michaelandpaula.com/mp/newpaper.html

The new paper should be available from them, they currently say, in various sizes, G2 and G3, in "early 2009."

I don't know how early is "early," but I'd suspect it would be at least a few months from now to get some feed back from the first general users.

Dennis, The new Lodima paper is very similar to the Canadian Azo in surface gloss. I don't have any means to measure so this is purely a subjective opinion but i would not call it a semi gloss paper.

jan

Agree with Jan on the surface - my initial comments above were made while the prints were in the wash so I hadn't seen them dried down yet. This is clearly a very fine paper. I hope they get the support they need to move forward with G2 and G3 versions.

My first impressions:

I've still got prints in the fixer and I'm typing this with a nitrile glove on my printing hand, so please bear in mind that what I write is a very cursory impression.

This paper needs a visibly stained negative if you're going to expose under a 300 watt bulb. Its frequency response is very different from Azo's. I first attempted to print negatives developed in Harvey's 777, which has no visible stain (although I've always believed it has invisible stain in the UV region). 777 negatives which print well on Azo with a 15 click exposure (I use a cadence of 100 beats/min.) turn nearly black with only 10 clicks on Lodima. I tried 4 different negatives this way and even the densest of them would only tolerate a 5 click (3 sec.) exposure to yield a good print. This is much too fast for me to control well. BUT, then I got out some semi-stand negatives developed in Pyrocat-HD. What a difference. Now 20 clicks of the metronome is too short a time. I'm getting beautiful results with negatives I heretofore considered unprintable.

BTW, I don't regard Lodima as any more contrasty than Azo (American, 1 minute) G2. Seems about the same. It appeared that way at first because of the speed, but I think it's just about right for a grade 2. It has by far the densest black I've ever seen in any paper. Blacker even than Azo G4.

It's definitely different than Azo. It'll take some adjustments in the way we all work, but my initial impressions are quite favorable.

Scott, how do the highlights dry down?

C6H6O3;

Very interesting.

This exposure difference indicates a different visible/UV sensitivity ratio in the new paper compared to Azo. I would suspect that those that use UV to print will see some difference as well, maybe a speed increase. IDK for sure. I would have to run a wedge spectrogram on it.

PE

Hey Jim,

Highlights dried down a touch - nothing significant, but noticeable.

PE,

I use a "cold one" Azo head (UV) to expose my prints. My exposures for Lodima are approx 1/3 of what they are for the 03/06 Grade 3 Azo. In other words 30 seconds for Grade 3 Azo = ~10 seconds with Lodima. My Grade 2 Azo (Rochester) is faster than Lodima. My Canadian Grade 2 Azo is slower than Lodima.