U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | RE: fixing van dyke brown AHEM!!!!!

RE: fixing van dyke brown AHEM!!!!!



I AM comatose!!!!!! We dilute rapid fix (using Patteson's) to 5% here in ol'
NZ......seems to bleach pretty quickly tho'.Maybe we are just Cr*p at VDB ;)

Kate

-----Original Message-----
From: Christina Z. Anderson [mailto:zphoto@montana.net] 
Sent: Thursday, 15 February 2007 3:39 p.m.
To: Alt, List
Subject: 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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