Bruce wrote:
> You can print photographs onto hand made papers as long as you use
>an internal sizing. Cyanotype works very well on hand made paper. Van Dyke
>process will work but I have not been able to get an accepteble black.
>SNIP<
Actually, I meant I never worked out an esthetic use for hand made paper
with my photography. A shame, I really enjoyed the work involved in paper
making, a very peaceful pursuit. The technical issues are, as you say, not
that difficult.
You mention "internal size". Today, in hand made paper circles, this is
usually an "alkylketene dimer". Seems to work with most alt processes, but
it gave me a lot of trouble in the beginning. It takes about two weeks to
"set" after the paper is dry. If you try and use the paper before this two
week period, you get all sorts of inconsistent results. Apparently you can
also use high heat to set the size, I had thought about trying a mounting
press, but never got around to it.
As for your "not been able to get an accepteble black", assuming that you
are using enough size, and letting it "set" for a couple weeks, try double
coating. Most hand made papers have larger fiber sizes and looser fiber
to fiber bonds than machine made paper. Perhaps this is why I always found
I had to coat once, allow the paper to dry, then coat again in order to get
a good D-Max. Also the amount of "beating" for fibers get seemed to
infuence D-Max, a Hollander sytle pulp gave a better D-Max than a kitchen
blender style pulp. I was using either cyanotype or palladium, not Van
Dyke though.
tomf2468@pipeline.com (Tom Ferguson)