fixing van dyke brown AHEM!!!!!
Well, I'm going to pull a Michael Koch-Schulte on y'all and grump about NO answers to my fixing van dyke brown question, except one nice person offlist. Am I chopped liver? Is everyone comatose? I can't believe no one does VDB lately. Are y'all just too busy doing GUM for heaven's sake? Or it must be that dreaded solarplate. At least my question didn't deal with tonal inversion... My original query: VDB requires a 2 minute 2-5% sodium thiosulfate bath fix....I was wondering if any of you get by with diluting regular rapid fix, and if so, how much. Well, I went ahead today and just did it. Thank heavens I don't have to test hydrochloric acid and pt/pd at the same time--thanks, Bob, for that one and I can't wait to hear the results. I diluted paper strength fix by half and I did not see any bleaching. Am I the only one that sees it this way? Or maybe it is just on Weston that it doesn't bleach? I fixed for 2 minutes, after a 2 minute water bath. The Weston paper is stupendous for VDB--rich, velvety bittersweet chocolate tones, very deep. Next to Arches Platine it is so much better looking--Platine seems greyish to me. Convincing enough to have students decide to use it instead of Platine. Convincing enough to look like a "poor man's palladium" in a sense. The one thing you have to watch out for in Weston, though, is not to touch the surface while wet because the top layer will abrade off. It is very delicate--somewhat like using a Japanese paper but thicker. But not as thick as Crane's Cover. But I may have already said all this in a previous email. Did I also say it was made from recycled blue jeans? Thank heavens my class moves into gum next week so I can get back to my process of choice. Chris CZAphotography.com
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