> John Rudiak--
>
> Please provide me more info on albumen. Since you have printed
> two portfolios on albumen, do you have a preferred density range for
> negs? It seems to me that albumen should support a contrastier neg than
> platinum.
Yes, it caqn support a contrastier negative, density range of about 2.3.
I believe this is at least partially due to the greater self-masking
effect in albumen as compared to platinum.
> > Also, my sensitizing
procedure was to float the albumenized
> paper on 12% AgNO3 for three minutes after the time that the paper
> stopped curling. Is this not the correct approach? Any thoughts would
> be welcomed! TIA Jim
>
I used 3 to five minutes also, with 12% AgNO3. First I would like to say
that I dried the albumin coated paper on a turntable mounted to the wall
modified to spin at a low speed. This gave a very even albumen coating,
preventing the albumen from thickening at the bottom of the sheet while
it dried. I tried turning the drying paper as it hung, but still had a
little trouble getting a ver even coat, and I noticed that as the albumen
coating thickened, the prints got darker in the thicker places. I add a
few drops of Sprint End Run to the albumen, which inhibits bubble
formation and the formaldehyde in it preserves to albumen and seems to
keep the whites from yellowing as much.
I bend up the corners of the paper to be coated and bow it, then lower it
down onto the albumen, hold the edges until the paper relaxes, then let
it sit. This is rather tedious so I figured that if I used a shallow
tray so that the solution level was very close to the top, I could float
the paper, and before it relaxed I could put a plexiglass lid over the
tray, holding the paper down until it did relaX.
I flattened the albumenized paper in a dry mount press prior to
sensitizing, which makes the floating oh so much easier.
BTW, I replenished my AgNO3 solution as I went along. Through a series
of tests, I determined that each 100 square inches of paper consumed
approximately 0.385 gm of silver nitrate.
I used Strathmore 500 series drawing paper, single weight, plate finish.
I think that's all I remember, oh yeah, myexposures ran about 10 minutes
for the enlarged 16X20 negatives.
One more thing- in my own work I discovered that if I took a normal
negative developed for contact printing on silver gelatin paper and
chromium intensified it using pyro as the redeveloper, it produced a
negative perfect for albumen. Luis Nadeau has one of my albumen prints
produced from one of these negatives.
Good luck
John