[alt-photo] Re: unimportant casein factoid

[Christina Anderson]

Keith,
You are luckier than I. I had to throw oodles of my pigment mixes out. Either they precipitated hardened chunks of casein, or they went "off" and smelled horrible, so I obviously did not add enough thymol. The casein I got from Kremer is still fine, just the solution I mixed up from powdered casein went bad. It only tells me, therefore, to mix up a small amount at once and then add pigments at time of use.

Definitely the solutions lost viscosity before they went bad, though.

BTW the first mentions of casein all have to do with suspending silver nitrate in the colloid. Have to read further to differentiate. But in the meantime I came across a great little article where Beattie, I think, said that Pouncy was the true originator of the carbon process with his 1858 patent, even though the carbon practitioners went to transfer, etc. Kinda cute. Poor Pouncy.

But all this reading is coming in the way of getting back into the dimroom :)
Chris

Christina Z. Anderson
christinaZanderson.com

On Aug 27, 2011, at 11:03 AM, Keith Gerling wrote:

> Yep.  I set it aside this summer, but am anxious to get going again.  BTW,
> the jar of very thick casein that i mixed up in the blender two months ago
> has not gotten very thin.  All by itself it went from the consistency of
> extremely thick glue, to something like cream.  It was preserved with thymol
> and it appears the same, it just got very thin.  All of the casein is still
> in there, so I'm crossing my fingers that it might still work, but I'm a
> little nervous since that was my entire casein supply from Kremer.  It does
> have some ammonia in it,  It didnt seem to do much when I added it, so I
> dumped in maybe too much?
> 
> Keith
> 
> On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Christina Anderson <zphoto at montana.net>wrote:
> 
>> Dear All,
>> So I've started back (finally out of tenure hell for the second time)
>> researching casein and came across this funny factoid from the late 1800s.
>> They differentiated between "the country cow and the town cow with the iron
>> tail," essentially that the town cow was not fed as well as the country cow,
>> and thus the casein content of the milk was lower than 4% and therefore did
>> not coagulate/produce as good a caseine for photography. Funny.
>> 
>> Anyone still working out the casein kinks?
>> Chris
>> 
>> Christina Z. Anderson
>> christinaZanderson.com
>> 
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