Names

Terry King ( 101522.2625@compuserve.com)
Mon, 13 January 1997 9:24 AM

Special Photographers.

As we have been having a discussion about what we should call ourselves
perhaps a little discussion of what we call what we do would not come
amiss.

When Randall Webb and I first made a kallitype we substituted cream of
tartar, for making scones, for the tartaric acid. The print cake out a
beautiful cafe au lait colour. I called it a 'teacakeotype'.

Recently we have had the Argyrotype, the Ziatype, Fotempera and others. New
names were found for different ways of doing things and this was all
perfectly legitimate. Sometimes new names were found for things that were
not new but were used as packaging and marketing tools or where the
ingredients were kept so secret that one wondered if the process was as
world significant as cola..

At one stage, when I was a little cynical, I called my variations Kingy
Thingy 1,2,3 and 4.

1 was where I substituted gold for platinum in the classsic platinum recipe
which produced good mauve prints and even a gold coloured one. This process
I called the Pterigold print. The 'P ' makes it look scientific and sound
like 'Terry' and avoided confusion with Terry's All Gold Chocolates. ( If
Peter could have a Fredericktype why couldn't I have a Pteritype ?).

2 was a substitution of silver for the platinum in the classic platinum
recipe. This produces prints that look like platinum prints.
In fact they are beautiful. Small variations can produce rich browns or
deep blacks. I called this process Ag (silver) fer (iron) ox (oxalate) or
agferox. If Agfa wanted to sue me it would make good publicity :-).

3 was a combination of Gloy and acrylic colours that worked in
multicoatings for multicolour printing. I called this the acrylochrome.

4 was a hardened substrate for gum prints using dichromated gloy or gum
arabic rather than hardened gelatine. This works very effectively without
staining. While looking up words beginning with 'pteri' in the dictionary
( Chambers, for dictionary mavens) I found, to my delight, 'pteroic acid'
which is the goody in spinach, just the word for a tough substrate. So this
version I called a 'pterotype'.

I have now a version of platrinum palladium printing that splits with the
platinum in brown and the palladium in blue without further toning. I
thought of calling this one after the song.

I am even beginning to wonder if the method I use for gum printing, where
each coat is mixed on a pallette rather than coming out of numbered
bottles, should have a name of its own.

Terry King

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