Pyro negs

I use pyro developed negatives and my printing times are no different than
non-stained negatives. I would suspect one of the following may be occuring:

1) is the film by any chance Tmax100? The new Tmax 100 has a UV blocking base
material that puts the UV spectrun b+f density of unexposed fixed film at
about 1.1! It is a horrible alt-process film for this reason. This would
square with your observation that the negatives look fine, but have enormous
print times. Or...

2) the person followed the often repeated suggestion to put the fixed film
back into the developer to increase the stain. IME, this will only add
general, non-image specific stain that serves to lengthen the printing times
and basically has no other utility for contact printing processes.

Good luck!

Clay
Hi all,

I have a question about negatives developed in Pyro. I taught a cyanotype
workshop yesterday, and while it all went well, there was a man in the class
who brought, what appeared to be, some of the most beautiful 4x5 negatives
I've ever seen. In fact, I thought they would have been perfect for platinum
printing. We had light boxes, and people also used the sun. But when he
tried to print these gorgeous negatives, the exposure time (in the light box)
was stretching an hour or more..and still, he was losing so much, especially
in the highlight area, and basically getting faint, washed-out images. He
tried exposing for nearly 2 hours, and he just wasn't getting anything. We
tried various options, with coating, with different papers..but these
negatives, though "perfect" by my estimation (and not bullet-proof in
appearance), were just impossible for making a decent cyanotype. He then told
me, towards the end, that he had developed these in Pyro. I thought Pyro was
great for platinum..and would have thought okay for cyantype. Haven't I read
that before? But not so in this case. That's the only explanation I could
think of (the Pyro stain). Can anybody tell me if this was the problem, and
if so, why don't Pyro developed negatives work for cyanotype?

If this has been discussed innumerable times before...I apologize...but
thanks for any help.

Diana
Received on Sun Oct 31 13:58:33 2004