Re: Pyro negs

Thanks. I know I taught a platinum class a couple of years ago, where
the person had developed his negatives in Pyro.. and those negatives
looked great also and printed beautifully. I've never seen anything
like these negatives yesterday. In fact, I did look at the film to see
what kind it was... Fujifilm 4x5 100. I'll ask him about the extra
step you mention to increase the stain.
On Oct 31, 2004, at 2:47 PM, wcharmon@wt.net wrote:

>
>
> 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 14:08:16 2004