If you've tried making a salt print, you'll know that after the paper is first exposed it has a lovely lilac color. This color changes when it hits the hypo, to a yellow-brown, which dries down to differing shades depending on all sorts of things. The final color can be reddish, brown, neutral and even maroon, but nothing close to the original delicate lilac color.
A recurring theme from old and new descriptions of salt prints is the desire not to lose those purplish tones. Reading them makes me wonder if that's a reason gold toners became popular, because they cause a shift toward purple, which people wanted because of the disappointment of seeing the lilac disappear! Chrisopher James even has a teaser in his instructions, saying he'll reveal how to do it at the end, which he does... his friend washes her salt prints in salt water ( which causes a shift toward red ) then re-exposes them to light to bring the lilac back out, then doesn't fix them and stores them in a dark box, regarding them as ephemeral objets d'art. I can relate to this... I make a lot of solargraphs which can be similarly ephemeral, and my daughter is well aware of looking at them in reduced light and quickly scanning them. After seeing one of my first salt prints she insisted it was perfect and I shouldn't fix it... just store it in a box. I think she had a point, and it never again looked as nice as it did when we viewed it in the contact frame.
I was just reading a couple of articles about chromoskedasic printing. One at the freestyle site and one at another site. Both mention that Jolly ( an originator of the process, whose name is also attached to Sabatier effect printing ) says if you don't want the colors to shift in the fixer then you should fix your photograph in a 1% solution of sodium thiocyanate for 20 seconds. This to be used in place of regular fixer. Like in salt prints, the varying colors in chromoskedasic printing are caused by different silver grain sizes and densities. I wonder if this approach could work for preserving the colors in a salt print?
Has anyone tried this? Thoughts? I just checked photographers formulary and sodium thiocyanate is not particularly expensive, 10 grams for less than $5.
A recurring theme from old and new descriptions of salt prints is the desire not to lose those purplish tones. Reading them makes me wonder if that's a reason gold toners became popular, because they cause a shift toward purple, which people wanted because of the disappointment of seeing the lilac disappear! Chrisopher James even has a teaser in his instructions, saying he'll reveal how to do it at the end, which he does... his friend washes her salt prints in salt water ( which causes a shift toward red ) then re-exposes them to light to bring the lilac back out, then doesn't fix them and stores them in a dark box, regarding them as ephemeral objets d'art. I can relate to this... I make a lot of solargraphs which can be similarly ephemeral, and my daughter is well aware of looking at them in reduced light and quickly scanning them. After seeing one of my first salt prints she insisted it was perfect and I shouldn't fix it... just store it in a box. I think she had a point, and it never again looked as nice as it did when we viewed it in the contact frame.
I was just reading a couple of articles about chromoskedasic printing. One at the freestyle site and one at another site. Both mention that Jolly ( an originator of the process, whose name is also attached to Sabatier effect printing ) says if you don't want the colors to shift in the fixer then you should fix your photograph in a 1% solution of sodium thiocyanate for 20 seconds. This to be used in place of regular fixer. Like in salt prints, the varying colors in chromoskedasic printing are caused by different silver grain sizes and densities. I wonder if this approach could work for preserving the colors in a salt print?
Has anyone tried this? Thoughts? I just checked photographers formulary and sodium thiocyanate is not particularly expensive, 10 grams for less than $5.
