salted printing paper
Richard Morris (Richard.Morris@brunel.ac.uk)
Tue, 3 Sep 1996 09:02:29 BST
Greetings folks. This is in the hopes that someone may be able to solve a
problem on making the salt paper as used by Talbot et al for prints. It is
a problem that I very occasionally encounter, and did so last week, and
possibly has to do with the paper being used and the time it is in the salt
water bath. My normal procedure is to soak the paper in the 2% salt
solution for around two minutes then hang it to dry. After which it is
coated with the silver nitrate. But some recent attempts have produced a
paper which prints in blotches. That is some of the print is strong and
some weak. I always use the same type of salt known as dentritic salt in
England which I think comes from the Cheshire mines. Has anyone any ideas?
It may be that just a quick dunk suffices rather than a complete soak. I
have tried floating the paper to salt one side only and that does work but
is tricky as the paper curls.
I am away from Thursday 6 and back again 23 September to southern Ireland.
Any alt-photo-process users there?
Richard Morris