Rockland Halo-Chrome: a cure for sinus trouble

[Pete H]

I was tempted by Tim Rudman's "Master Photographer's Toning Book" (a masterpiece of clarity) to try silver-bronze mirror toning using Rockland Halo-Chrome.

Rule 1: Make sure your darkroom is well ventilated!
The ammonia *really* gets up your nose.

Rules 2 and 3: see rule 1.

Rule 4: practice the technique for getting a smooth flow of toner over the print - it's very easy to get slosh marks on the print.

Rules 5 - 10: repeat rule 1 !!!

Question: the instruction leaflet says "Obtain a bottle of houshold ammonia at the cleaning supplies section of a grocery store. Dilute one part of ammonia with 2 parts of water." What is the desired final concentration of the ammonia? I eventually found a bottle of cleaning fluid labelled 5 - 15% ammonia. I have no idea how much (if at all) to dilute it. Does anybody know? Is the concentration important (apart from the nasal damage!) ?

Anyway, using direct toning with a very early snatch from the toner gives a faint warm silver-pink sheen to the highlights. I doubt whether it would scan, but I don't have a flat-bed scanner anyway. The results look pretty good and worth some more experiments.

 

[Valerie]

Pete,
I used Halochrome many years ago on a project. This is what it looks like scanned (not to mention toned incorrectly!) I don't remember using ammonia, so cannot help you with that issue. (there was a url link here which no longer exists)
The effects are great on the right image. Hope to see your images here!

 

[Pete H]

Thanks Valerie. That's a nice composition and I bet the Halo-Chrome effect looks good in the original!

I still need to experiment a lot with it - it's promising so far but I need to improve my sloshing technique, since there are more flow marks than I like.

On the Rockland website it says that the version of Hao-Chrome sold in the US doesn't need ammonia added, but the export version does.