[pure-silver] Re: Warmtone prints revisited
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 21:06:12 -0700
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charlie Thorsten" <charlie_thorsten@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 2:03 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] Warmtone prints revisited
> Hi everyone,
>
> A while back I had commented about trying to
> get a good warm tone with Ilford MGFB Warmtone
> paper. No matter what developer, etc. I used,
> I still got a relatively white paper base and
> only a moderately warm print color. I ended
> up settling on Selectol Soft as the best
> developer for this project.
>
> So anyway, after hearing the news about Ilford,
> I decided to stock up on as much 16x20 FB WT
> as I needed to finish this project. I had been
> buying it locally, but for this large order I
> called B&H and had them ship 8 50-sheet boxes
> of the stuff, requesting that they all have the
> same emulsion number. It arrived the next week.
>
> One day I'm printing along happily, listening
> to some Pink Floyd. I use up the last locally
> acquired paper and open a box of the new B&H
> emulsion, process the first test and WHAM!!!!
> Yellow-brown-warmtone like I'd never seen!!
> I compared the two prints I had just processed,
> one after the other (same chemistry, time, etc.)
> and the color difference was astounding.
>
> So it turns out my problem *was* with the paper,
> which is strange because I had tried THREE
> different emulsions from three different sources
> here in Southern California, and they were all
> relatively neutral tone. It's the New York
> paper that had the warmtone I was looking for.
>
> I guess Ilford's been having quite a bit of
> production variation at their plant, eh? What
> do you guys think?
>
>
> -Charlie
>
> (As a side note, I tried the new stuff in Agfa
> Neutol WA and it was almost TOO warm. I'm
> staying with Selectol Soft. The lower contrast
> works well with these images.)
>
>
I am curious if the paper base is the same color as the
older paper. The base tint makes a tremendous difference,
even neutral tone paper like Kodabromide looked warm on warm
white base. In the dim, distant, past both Kodak and
Agfa/Ansco offered several base tints. These ranged from a
blue-white through neutral white to old ivory (a Kodak
tint). Old Ivory with warm toned emulsion gave something of
the effect of caucation skin color. All of these colors are
long gone.
As far as the emulsion I think Ilford has been having
quality control problems for some time. These may be the
result of economizing. There have been a number of reports
of problems with Ilford film. I think the lesson is that
when management/ownership of a company really do not want to
be in a particular business they are apt not to do it very
well. Its useless to rail against the effects of digital
imaging on the photographic products business: all
businesses are in existence to make money for their
investors. If a particular product or service looks to be
unprofitable or to have a shrinking market the sensible
thing is to get out of it and put the money elsewhere, even
if its a business far removed from the original one. There
is nothing new about this. For instance, the company that
became Graflex started out being in the metal products
business specializing in gas lighting fixtures. Pretty far
removed from cameras. Also remember that Xerox started out
as Haloid, a photographic products company.
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
=============================================================================================================
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:
