I got some old Kodak paper (some fiber and some RC) for free. I've confirmed the fiber is fogged by developing some without exposing it to anything besides the safelight (and that was only for as long as it took to get it through the chemistry). It's unevenly fogged, so some might be from light getting through the packaging and it will likely change through the pack.
It seems a shame to just toss it. Are there some alternative process things I can do with it? If my free time and a sunny day ever coincide, I'll may try some lumen printing, but that's all I've thought of so far.
Contact a local school and offer to show youngsters the wonders of silver-based photography by doing photograms with them. Who knows, they might get into the hobby, become APUG members some day, and make sure Kodak and Ilford keep making the stuff for all of us.
Just a thought, but to little is done to get young people interested in what we do and love, and fogged paper may serve a useful purpose this way.
It certainly does look like an interesting project. I threw out a completely full box of Kodak paper last year that I got as part of an auction. Man, what a waste. But I have another one that just came recently, and the worst that can happen is I don't find this to be workable and throw it out, too.
But surely there's *SOMETHING* I can find to do with it.
I intend to give this POP idea a try. A number of former photographers who turned to digisnapping gave me boxes and boxes of long expired paper. Thanks for the research, John.
juan
I tried the saltpeter treatment on some old Spiratone paper. Exposure for about 20-minutes with my UV box gave a nice looking printed out image. However, about 15-seconds in dilute fixer removed almost all of the image. It seems more experimentation is needed. Maybe my fix was not dilute enough.
juan
Fixing for permanence is needed for sure. The usually routine is; Expose, wash until your wash water does not turn milky any more (in POP that is the unexposed silver nitrate combining with the chloride in the tap water: a precipitate of silver chloride), than tone in gold (or Pt or Pd or even Se) and than fix in a relative weak hypo fix (say 10% for 2 minutes), rapid fix is too strong usually..