simultaneous exposure and development?

maltfalc · Jun 3, 2007

i haven't worked with traditional b&w chemistry since a brief period in highschool more than a decade ago, so this may be a really dumb idea. say i had an easel for an enlarger that could pump a liquid between the surface of the paper and a sheet of glass. could i expose a sheet of paper while running developer over it, stopping the exposure and flushing out the developer when the image appears?

Poco · Jun 3, 2007

I stuck a developer soaked piece of fiber paper under the enlarger once and all I got was a mess and no really wonderful results that made it worth it.

Now that I think about it, it might be interesting to see what beads of water or developer on the paper do -- wouldn't they act as little lenses for the projected image?

david b · Jun 3, 2007

how about putting your developer tray underneath the enlarger?

Pinholemaster · Jun 3, 2007

Jim Jones · Jun 3, 2007

If you try to expose and develop simultaneously, the emerging image will tend to mask itself, reducing exposure. An exaggerated example of this is the Sabattier effect.

percepts · Jun 3, 2007

Why? Because!

but you seem to be wanting to make life difficult for yourself. Just snatch print from dev tray and re-expose. Simply make some pin registers for accurate repositioning under the enlarger.

lee · Jun 3, 2007

I used to work for a company that manufactured a headline typesetting machine called the "phototypositor". It had a 2 inch strip of photo paper in a channel and a lens of some sort over the paper. Developer was sluiced under the lens and on to of the paper. The rest of the machine was sort of an enlarger. You could position the letter the expose it and while it was developing you could move the letter to the next letter and then move the paper along and start all over again.

lee\c

maltfalc · Jun 3, 2007

Poco said:
I stuck a developer soaked piece of fiber paper under the enlarger once and all I got was a mess and no really wonderful results that made it worth it.

Now that I think about it, it might be interesting to see what beads of water or developer on the paper do -- wouldn't they act as little lenses for the projected image?

i'm not surprized. without fresh developer flowing over the surface of the paper what little developer has soaked into it would get used up faster in the areas exposed to more light so you'd probably end up with a pretty dull grey print.

maltfalc · Jun 3, 2007

Jim Jones said:
If you try to expose and develop simultaneously, the emerging image will tend to mask itself, reducing exposure. An exaggerated example of this is the Sabattier effect.

depending on the lag between the paper's reaction to light and it's reaction to the developer it may be that the paper will only have a faint image visible by the end of the exposure that will continue to develop afterwards. i really only need enough of an image to be able to tell when the paper or film has been properly exposed.

laverdure · Jun 3, 2007

In "The Craft of Photography" David Vestal wrote about printing onto paper that he'd pre-soaked in developer. He said that it was self-masking, like POP, and an occasionally useful trick for printing overly hard negatives. That was sometime around 1974. I've never tried it.

percepts · Jun 3, 2007

maltfalc said:
depending on the lag between the paper's reaction to light and it's reaction to the developer it may be that the paper will only have a faint image visible by the end of the exposure that will continue to develop afterwards. i really only need enough of an image to be able to tell when the paper or film has been properly exposed.

the emergence time of a print can be anything from a few seconds to a minute or so depending on paper, dev and temp. Temp will be affected by ambient temp in darkroom with your system and if you are using hot dev, say 40deg, it will cool as it fills space between glass and print until glass warms up unless you are using preheated glass.
I think you are making life very difficult for yourself unless there is a specific reason why you need this method. It would be much easier to move paper through dev rather dev over paper. And you have not considered fix yet.

karavelov · Jun 3, 2007

I have read somewhere that Mortensen used the same method to make enlarged interpositive for the final negative - it has to be on the dull side in order to print full scale on paper. I have tried once the method and it worked.
I do not think that registration easel will help because the fiber paper has different dimensions when wet and dry. May be it could be done with RC...

gainer · Jun 3, 2007

I tried it. It is a mess. As David Vestal said, it might be good for an extremely contrasty negative such as one would use with POP. Probably best with fiber base paper.

There was once and may still be a printing paper with developer incorporated in the emulsion. I used to use it in a roller transport developing machine. The paper could also be developed quite nicely in a tray of carbonate solution.

Helen B · Jun 3, 2007

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Best,
Helen

dancqu · Jun 3, 2007

laverdure said:
In "The Craft of Photography" David Vestal wrote about
printing onto paper that he'd pre-soaked in developer. He
said that it was self-masking, like POP, and an occasionally
useful trick for printing overly hard negatives. That was
sometime around 1974. I've never tried it.

Wet paper printing. As a matter of fact I've been doing
some of that over the last few days. My intent though is
perfectly flat paper printing; no easel no sticky no vacuum.

There are some few procedural matters to deal with but
suffice it to say for now that I have been wetting, sponge
drying front and back then placing upon a flat prepositiond
surface. I've more study of the method to do. Cannot
comment except to say it looks promising.

As for pre-wetting in developer, I gave that a try back
in the fifties, like in 1950s, after having read about it.
What a mess, dripping wet. I'll sponge this time so
will be giving it another go. Dan

Kobin · Jun 3, 2007

This is a printed-out/developed out image:

I soaked Oriental Seagull VCFB Warmtone II in Ilford Cooltone diluted 1+3 for 4 minutes, squeegied the paper onto glass, and exposed under the enlarger until the image grayed out. I then developed it in Neutrol WA 1:15 for six minutes.

It was an experiment, and it worked ok for what it was.

K.

Maris · Jun 3, 2007

Fibre base paper soaked in developer and then rolled onto glass contains enough chemistry to give a good black. The self masking effect can be quite pronounced and I have used this to balance sky and land renditions in landscape photographs.

First the "land" exposure is made and a few minutes of development follow. Without moving anything the "sky" exposure is made and the photograph goes to the fix when development stops advancing. With variable contrast papers land and sky can be done semi-independently.

There is a downside. Calibrating the paper soaking and the exposures and the interim development times involves a lot of variables. My calibrations don't seem to carry over from one day to the next and every attempt is a fresh start. Parts of the photograph can show strong adjacency effects and hard to predict sabattier patches. Even worse is the fact that fibre base paper changes size between wet and dry. Registration between multiple exposures on a continually drying piece of FB is not guaranteed.

The upside is if you accidentally get enough weird effects in your photograph it can safely be passed off as Art. No one will argue.

dancqu · Jun 5, 2007

Maris said:
Fibre base paper soaked in developer and then rolled onto
glass contains enough chemistry to give a good black. The
self masking effect can be quite pronounced and I have used
this to balance sky and land renditions in landscape photographs.

I think the same results without the downside mentioned may be
better achieved using the post-exposure pre-development process
known as SLIMT. An extremely dilute one-shot solution of potassium
ferricyanide + potassium bromide is employed to preferentially reduce
the dense area latent image. Have you given SLIMT a try? Dan

simultaneous exposure and development?

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