From: dean kansky (dkansky@hotmail.com)
Date: 02/10/00-02:13:31 PM Z
Judy sent me an article that was published in a now defunct magazine. The
procedure entailed developing and stopping a silver print, bringing it out
in the light (letting the undeveloped silver darken and color), and painting
on fixer (when the print had been colored by the exposure to light).
I am not a "photograms N flowers" kind of guy, but I thought they would be
good to experiment with. So started a comedy of errors, the details of which
I will not fixate on (i.e, why I HAD to work that day on the photogram and
why I COULD NOT miss my lunch date).
I started in the morning since I had a lunch date. I thought I could save
time by 1) working in my bathroom (as opposed going into my darkroom which
is in the basement of the building) and I worked assembly line style:
exposing and developing print after print (which I placed in a tray of water
until the time when I would "stop" all of my prints assembly line style).
Well I ran out of time after the development phase. I was late! So, very
quickly, I ran the "face" of each print under water, walked out into the
light, and stuck the prints in an unused blotter book (I had left my
squeegee in my darkroom and I had no time air dry them. So, try as I might
to dry them, these RC paper prints were still wet).
The next day, I took the prints out and noticed three things: the pages of
the blotter were warped (because my prints had not been that dry), there
were chemical stains on the blotter pages, and the B&W RC paper was COLORED
in pastels of blue, yellow, pink. So instead of the standard photogram: a
white silhouette of flowers on a black background, I had colored flowers on
a black background.
1) there was not much developer on the face of the prints, otherwise, when I
took them out into the light (before putting them into the blotter books)
the white flowers would have turned grey.
2) While silver will turn blue or red in PROLONGED DIRECT LIGHT (this is
what the article Judy sent me is predicated on), a) these print were not
subject to prolonged light (they were sandwiched in a blotter book that was
stored in a dark closet) and 2) in addition to blue and red, the flowers
also turned yellow.
Clearly the water, developer, and blotter paper were the elements that lead
to a chemical reaction. But does anyone know exactly why it happened?
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