Proper exposure and development for salt prints

[Doc W]

I made my first salt prints today (which would not have been possible without fellow APUGer, Hexavalent, guiding me through the weird stuff). It was mostly successful (and very exciting, like my first print ever), but I need to produce negatives better suited to salt printing. There was just not enough contrast. The range in the negative was about 1.3 above fbf. I have read it should be about 1.7 or even 2.0.

I am pretty much immersed in the Zone System so I am trying to get my head around what to do for negatives for salt printing. I have read that negatives should be developed about 150% of normal. If I meter a scene and it shows normal development, should I then just add 50% development? What if the scene I meter indicates, say, N-2 development. Should I just develop that normally?

Is there a good online explanation of this?

 

[Doc W]

No salty dogs here?

 

[The Stone]

Hey Doc, i hope you've had some luck with your salt printing since you posted this question. I haven't had alot of practice with the zone system but since you haven't had any response I thought mine would be better than none. I am interested to explore the zone system for my salt prints but till now i have had quite good results by incident metering 2/3 stop over and then doubling the development. This method obviously goes against the idea of the zone system so I have found it tricky to understand how the zone system might be applied to salt printing. From what i've been taught the salt print needs a dense negative with plenty of information in the shadows and good density in the highlights. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts/discoveries on this topic.


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