Kenny is made from a 2 1/4 transparency and is combination of a Super XX neg
and lith negs. I will often make a couple of lith negs just for shadow or
highlight detail. I have no qualms about sandwiching two negs together or
making two exposures on the same coat. In this case I didn't need the color
information and made the negs with no filtration. Also this is something I
stumbled on quite by accident. I printed the last shadow coat with lamp
black. Then in the wash, brushed the whole print, the deepest areas of the
black come off and "lift" some of the underneath coats with it.
Trees is a 4x5 neg, super-XX positive and about 10 kodalith negs. The negs
were exposed in 1/2 stop increments so I had a range of negs from just
printing the highlight detail to a neg that was almost completely black and
just printing the shadow detail.
Richard is an experiment I did in reversal processing Kodalith negs. Making
a range of negs like tress. From a 2 1/4x2 1/4 B+W neg I enlarged onto 16x20
Kodalith and used reversal processing chemistry formula from the Handbook for
Contemporary Photographers. I did this a couple of times but it wasn't much
fun.
I am now using the Agfa cont. tone film and lith film combinations most of
the time. And when I have a choice I shoot color neg. film, make separation
positives and enlarge from those. As time goes on I do less and less
tri-color work.
With the sizing I use, the eyes are often pretty white but if I need to I'll
take a spotting brush while in the wash and work on them a little bit.
Particularly in the yellow coats. I find I usually need from 3 to 5 yellow
coats so if I open up the eyes on one or two of those coats it works pretty
well. Sharon's eyes aren't quite as white as they reproduced on the promo.
The Veils eyes are just about exact to the original and there was no
brushing on that print at all. Except for cleaning up a little of the white
area to the right of her face.
I use "hard gelatin" from Tri-Ess. I used to use Knox then I tested 150
Bloom and 250 Bloom from Tri-Ess and found the 250 Bloom much better for my
use (clearer highlights). They for some reason have renamed the 250 to Hard
Gelatin. I'll have to call them and find out exactly what it is. One of the
great revelations from the list is that I don't have to harden in
formaldehyde but all my paper till now has been hardened that way.
Bernie