Re: darkrooms & water


Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Tue, 01 Jun 1999 22:08:01 -0400 (EDT)


On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Michael Keller wrote:

> I use a plexi archival washer, it's the kind of thing that's real easy to fill,
> wash, dump and refill several times. I've never observed a problem with the
> brighteners, but it's probably wise to heed the advice. I've also never used
> wash times as short as Ilford recommends, the problem is doing batches of prints
> it's hard to police them and there's no complete isolation of dirty prints from
> clean ones, so you pretty much have to wash until the last print is clean. I
> suspect that you have to
> test each paper for this, cause as I said, NOTHING I did would make Polyfiber
> pass the residual silver test without a full, long fix. Ilford FBMG, Oriental,
> Zone VI all did fine.<shrug>

Michael, maybe I was committing some sin without realizing it, but when
printing silver gelatin I put the prints in a holding bath, a deep tray,
of very weak hypoclear until I was ready to wash all together. The
hypoclear I found BTW also kept my UNHARDENED prints much better than they
kept in just water. I could leave them in the holding bath for days, and
even in warm weather not get holes in the emulsion, as I got after a mere
4 or 5 hours in plain water in summertime.

Judy



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