Wearing gloves when processing black & white paper

[Milpool]

Yeah and anyway didn’t Atget supposedly stand develop with glycin? Problem solved.

Oh gosh, A couple years ago PBS ran a fascinating documentary on just how dangerous Victorian/Edwardian era homes were due to naivety about household chemicals, indiscriminate bottle labeling, the toxicity of common colorants even in wallpaper, the arrival of electrical hazards, etc. It's hard to imagine that houses in Paris in Atget's era didn't have comparable risks. Even earlier, some surmise that the premature death of Napoleon during his exile was due to the toxicity of the curtain dye where he was confined. And look at what kinds of nasty chemicals many early photographers were routinely exposed to. It wasn't just hatters who went mad from mercury fuming. Even surgeons didn't wear gloves or sterilize anything; do you want to return to that? People live longer on average these days for a reason, at least during peacetime.

 

[DREW WILEY]

And we should be glad that disposable nitrile gloves are about 15 cents apiece. But if a Nike logo was put on the same ones, they'd be $200 apiece; Atget signature branding, maybe $500 apiece; Leica logo, a thousand dollars apiece. Price per pair obviously double that.

 

[Mal Paso]

I hate gloves but will wear them to keep fingerprints off and to handle rough objects now that I have Old Man Skin, when I remember. lol

I recently switched from fingers to tongs in the darkroom.

Anyone have a good source for inexpensive cotton gloves? The fairly thin white ones for handling negs and prints?

 

[xkaes]

Just one more reason to use tubes.

Paper or Plastic?

NEITHER!

 

[DREW WILEY]

The problem with cotton gloves is that you need to get all the free lint out of them before handling prints. A cold water wash by hand, then air drying, helps. And finger oils will eventually work through them; you want to clean your hands before putting them on.

I'd lug around a big black museum case with a handle, with mounted prints inside. Once open, there was a neatly fashioned little side compartment too, with a clean pair of white gloves in it, along with my business cards. That always impressed the gallery owners, that is, back in the pre-lazy days when they actually looked at real prints and not just digitized facsimiles.

 

[eli griggs]

I develop my prints for three minutes in Dektol 1:2. I’m using those blue gloves.

I do this to avoid future contact dermatitis.

I don’t often get poison oak but one time I was helping coastal cleanup day with a bunch of scouts (several are Eagle now, one just had board of review two days ago -congrats).

One tree was being strangled by poison oak and I decided that would be my assignment. I was very careful. Wore gloves and used tools to take it down.

But then we went camping and I stayed in the uniform and next day sure enough a rash developed on my right arm.

It didn’t hurt or itch but the redness lasted a couple months.

The Psoriasis I have sometimes hurts like 2ed degree burns but no darkroom respiratory sensitivities,, vision, obstructive breathing, etc.

I will admit Kodak acidic acid does smell revolting to me, but not to the point I won't use it, as needed.

One thing Idid do though was smoke heavenly in the dark room, but I quit what grew to be a five pack a day habit, cold turkey, 24.04.89 and and happy to say, other than cleaning the occasional enlarger lens optic and in the latter phase, prints that smelled of cigarettes, no harm was done.

 

[eli griggs]

The problem with cotton gloves is that you need to get all the free lint out of them before handling prints. A cold water wash by hand, then air drying, helps. And finger oils will eventually work through them; you want to clean your hands before putting them on.

I'd lug around a big black museum case with a handle, with mounted prints inside. Once open, there was a neatly fashioned little side compartment too, with a clean pair of white gloves in it, along with my business cards. That always impressed the gallery owners, that is, back in the pre-lazy days when they actually looked at real prints and not just digitized facsimiles.

When I needed to have quality cotton gloves, without lint, I used one set of a couple pairs of good, white Tuxedo gloves.

If you try this, buy the best you can, and opt to buy the type with no uncovered skin at the base of the hand's palm.

I'm sure I've at least one pair remaining ing my darkroom, though nitrile gloves without previous chemical contact or having been in contact with skin or oily machinery or geers.

 

[cliveh]

Did AA use gloves?

 

[Don_ih]

Did AA use gloves?

Probably not but what does it matter what he or anyone else did? Wearing gloves has only to do with whether or not you want whatever is in the chemicals to get on your skin. Has nothing to do with people you admire.

 

[DREW WILEY]

AA also smoked and drank too much, and there were consequences later in life. Edward Weston developed Parkinson's disease as did several other ungloved people working with pyro, and whether or not there is a direct link, there should at least be a common sense warning lesson concerning that. And I don't care to recite how many people I personally knew suffered severe, even fatal, health consequences due to a macho "artiste" attitude with the things they handled with bare skin or breathed in.

I've also seen a lot of fools wandering through the underbrush in shorts and T-shirts and encountering a lot of poison oak and ticks, which might or might not constitute a serious health incident, depending, but certainly isn't an enjoyable experience either. I've personally developed sensitivity to metol and RA4 chemistry, so try to limit my exposure to those as much as possible, even though I still work with those chemicals.

 

[wiltw]

Did AA use gloves?

Were there ever Picker-modified Zone gloves, y'know to equalize sensitivities?!

 

[MattKing]

Were there ever Picker-modified Zone gloves, y'know to equalize sensitivities?!

 

[skahde]

Rarely wore nitril-gloves but always used tongs, often washed my hands and took care to avoid any skin-contact with substances I wouldn't eat or drink either. When wearing gloves permanently it poses the risk to unitentionally transfer contaminants on other surfaces from the wet- to the dry-side of printing.
Therefore, used gloves stricktly have to stay on the wet side which means taking them on and off with every sheet. Not very practical or efficient and an invitation for sloppy tricks like blowing into them with your mouth to get them unrolled and on again. Ahh... and which side was out or in, again? After a while it gets hard to tell.

When mixing chemicals I see the point but for printing It's more a risk than a safet-measure.

 

[cliveh]

During my time in teaching photography, I had a throughput of 1000s of A-level students, none of which wore gloves. We did use tongs, But am sure hundreds dipped their hands into print dev, stop and fix without any ill effects I ever heard of.

 

[DREW WILEY]

There were no special Fred Picker gloves. In his case, he'd sell you a bottle of secret medicine wagon formula, you'd drink it, and then afterwards, you'd glow in the dark at a particular wavelength undetected by Tri-X film, and at the same time, be made magically immune to any developer side effects.

 

[Bill Burk]

During my time in teaching photography, I had a throughput of 1000s of A-level students, none of which wore gloves. We did use tongs, But am sure hundreds dipped their hands into print dev, stop and fix without any ill effects I ever heard of.

Supplying students would have been a logistics nightmare. Anyway most of them didn’t go on in photography. The ines that did probably shoot digital now.

The ones like us, are likely to do this often enough to be worth the precaution.

I went through five gloves yesterday in 9 prints and a test strip. Did the test strip one-gloved. Did the prints in two batches of four, double gloved, followed up with a straggler.

 

[revdoc]

Some years back I switched to single-tray processing, so I require neither gloves nor tongs; dry paper goes into the tray and isn't touched until after the post-fixer rinse. It's simpler, cleaner, and requires a lot less bench space. I'm surprised more people don't do it.

 

[GregY]

Some years back I switched to single-tray processing, so I require neither gloves nor tongs; dry paper goes into the tray and isn't touched until after the post-fixer rinse. It's simpler, cleaner, and requires a lot less bench space. I'm surprised more people don't do it.

...but it's a nuisance for processing multiple prints don't you think? And certainly if you're processing big 16x20 or 20x24"prints....

 

[Don_ih]

I switched to single-tray processing

a nuisance for ... big 16x20 or 20x24"prints.

That's when I do single-tray processing - when the print is larger than 11x14. I don't really have space for more than one huge tray. But I wouldn't want to do multiple prints that way. So I almost never make large prints (have no use for them, anyway).

 

[DREW WILEY]

Think about it - If you walked out of the darkroom wearing black gloves, you could brag you were using amidol developer, even though you weren't !

 

[Doremus Scudder]

I use tongs when printing (as mentioned). I can print for eight hours straight and never dip my hands in a chemical. Yes, I will pick up a print from the running water bath and get my hands wet, but tongs for everything else. It's not difficult at all. Get some decent tongs; one in each hand for larger prints, and just stay away from the chemicals with your hands.

Gloves are great for what they are intended to do, but are unnecessary if you can avoid contact with the chemicals any other way.

Pet Peeve: Food-service workers who don floppy vinyl gloves and leave them on for hours, handling food, implements, cash, etc. with them. Maybe they don't know that the gloves should be protecting us from them and not vice versa...

Best,

Doremus

 

[DREW WILEY]

Tray chemicals never splash ??? I can't control even kitchen ketchup or salad dressing to that degree.

 

[Peter Schrager]

Thank you to the Inventor Of nitrile gloves
Personally tongs suck and I use nitrile gloves always. I can't even believe in this day that someone would use baré hands.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I have fewer contamination problems and fewer mistakes when I use tongs simply because it fully engages the brain when I have to stop and think "Which hand and which of the tongs to I need now?"

 

[Bill Burk]

I developed a print without gloves tonight because I was just doing one.

When I flossed my teeth I could taste the Dektol