further adventures with Rising/Zia


Carl Weese (cjweese@wtco.net)
Sat, 03 Apr 1999 12:29:31 -0500


At risk of boring list members who don't care about platinum printing,
I've got more news to report on Rising Bristol 2 Ply Plate finish paper
and Ziatype. In the past several days I've done a mass of printing
mostly from new 7x17 negatives and find I'm in love with the Rising/Zia
combination.

Color possibilities are extraordinary. A basic formula produces a
warm/neutral print with nice color complexity (by which I mean something
resembling a very subtle split tone, or variation in color through the
tonal scale). Replacing just 25% of the lithium-palladium with
cesium-palladium produces a beautiful warm print with chocolate
mid-tones, warmer than even an all-cesium print on Platinotype or
Platine. Going to 50/50 produces a print about as warm--but different in
chroma--from what we usually associate with a traditional all-palladium
develop-out.

Replacing 25% of the ammonium ferric oxalate with lithium ferric oxalate
produces a print that is again as warm as traditional palladium but in a
different color flavor: red rather than brown. At 50/50 the print is too
red for my taste and I don't want to know what higher proportions of LFO
might produce. Good for a shot of a fire engine, maybe.

The paper is easy to handle physically: the surface is very hard and
smooth, but absorbs coatings easily (I'm treating it the same way I do
Platine, printing in a high humidity environment ~70 RH). Large areas of
even middle tone (I've been printing seascapes shot under stormy New
England skies) are the smoothest I've ever seen. All the more since the
7x17's are on HP5+ which is far from my favorite film in the
tonal-smoothness department. The sheets give me no trouble with flatness
in my large print frame which tends to fail miserably with large prints
on platinotype. The paper is very tough and easy to handle wet. I
haven't seen the slightest sign of the ply's separating.

If anyone else out there is experimenting with this (Kerik??) I haven't
tried sodium tungstate for additional warming yet, and I haven't tried
preplacing palladium with either gold or platinum to cool the color.
David Kennedy has mentioned that with develop-out prints the color can
also be warmed with acid clearing baths and I haven't had a chance to
check on that either. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's results
(with any paper, of course!).

---Carl



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