[pure-silver] Re: Favorite Print Developer and Tea staining

Well there is no question that it is a staining affect. I find that just a bit of stain doesn't haze over the whites enough to notice and the extra warmth is appealing. I have had the discussion before of whether old Glycin will stain or not and perhaps it only occurs on some papers but there can be no doubt in my case that the Glycin that came from the jar the color of Nestle Quick made my print base warmer than the fresh bright stuff that I now have. Actually I left my current pound of Glycin sitting around unrefrigerated till now it has picked up a bit of color so it goes to it's proper place in my freezer.
As to the Tea. It is very simple to do. I use a gallon of stop bath in a 11x14 tray as my normal. To that I add a 3 cup pot of black tea ( I use Taylors Yorkshire Red only because I don't like to drink it... I prefer the pure Assam.)
The reason I decided to try it in the stop bath is that I figured the only function of the stop is to change the PH so it is not as bad as contaminating the developer or the fix and I don't have to bother with setting up another tray just for tea at the end. The staining action of the tea is variable depending on the amount of time you leave the print in the stop. I find that at 30 seconds I get just a slight warming that makes the paper base look more like the warm tone papers from the 80s and before. If you leave the print in the stop for a minute it imparts quite a rich warm paper base. If you leave it in 2 minutes you get a golden print and the hazing over of the whites is starting to be seen. 

Here is an example of a very stained print..

http://www.pbase.com/dpurdy/image/96968545
If you go to the thumbnails of this gallery you will see that some prints are warmer than others by varying degrees. As the prints are all made on Oriental WT and all processed in Ansco 130, the difference in color is always the amount of time left in the tea stop. Probably nearly half of these images are slightly warmed that way. 

Dennis


On Sep 22, 2008, at 21:32, Jeffrey Thorns wrote:


What kind of tea?
My favorite developer for printing on warm tone paper is Ansco 130 with Glycin so old that it has turned milk chocolate brown. It adds just a bit of warm stain to the paper. The same can be achieved by adding a cup of tea to the stop bath. 

Dennis
======================================================================= ====================================== To unsubscribe from this list, go to www.freelists.org and logon to your account (the same e-mail address and password you set-up when you subscribed,) and unsubscribe from there. 



=============================================================================================================
To unsubscribe from this list, go to www.freelists.org and logon to your 
account (the same e-mail address and password you set-up when you subscribed,) 
and unsubscribe from there.

Other related posts: