Lithovision
My Fotospeed lith printing kit turned up the other day so I took the chance last night to give it a go. The kit comes with all you need to do your first lith printing: Developer (parts A & B), 10 sheets of fibre based paper, a couple of funky white powdery chemicals and some rather vague instructions.
The first thing I needed to do was to mix up the developer, the bottles said to mix it 1:9 with water but the instructions said to use 15ml of developer to 435ml of water. Now if you're even the slightest bit proficient when it comes to maths you might see the discrepancy here; the instructions were saying to dilute the developer nearly 4 times more than the label on the bottles. In the end I decided to go with the instructions as, I thought, this would mean that the prints would develop slower and it would be easer to judge the 'snatch point'. This decision turned out to be a little annoying as it meant that the exposed paper was taking around 20 minutes to develop! Next time I'll be following the dilutions that the bottles are telling me.
Going back to the start of the process, I read that the best way to get some idea of the right exposure time was to create a normal test print and develop it in standard developer, then use two stops more time for the lith exposure. After creating a test print I decided that 12 seconds was the best exposure time. This time was doubled and doubled again (two extra stops), which took the exposure time to 48 secs.
I exposed the first sheet of paper for 48 secs then slid it into the developer and started to agitate. I had a timer close by so I could see how long the process would take. The first print was a little hairy since it took around 3 minutes before anything started appearing and at that stage all I could see was the border between the exposed and unexposed paper. After 15 mins or so the print was getting close to where I wanted it, I left it a little longer and pulled it from the developer, then used stop-bath and fixed it.
After turning the light back on (this whole process takes place under red safe-light conditions which are much harder to work under than the amber light I'm used to) the print looked pretty good, if a bit on the light side. I left the next print in the soup quite a bit longer but it turned out to be too long as the bottom of the print had no detail at all. I made one last print, this time developed longer than the first but shorter than the second, which turned out to be the best of the bunch. The image below is a scan of the print.
Lith printing seems to create a great mood, especially for this kind of image, I'm glad I tried it ans will definitely be doing more lith printing in the future as I've got a few other images that I think would work well with lith. As a side note I've kept some of the used developer (called 'old brown') as once added to fresh developer it is supposed to create slightly better tones straight away, something that it would only do after a few prints have gone through it normally.
The first thing I needed to do was to mix up the developer, the bottles said to mix it 1:9 with water but the instructions said to use 15ml of developer to 435ml of water. Now if you're even the slightest bit proficient when it comes to maths you might see the discrepancy here; the instructions were saying to dilute the developer nearly 4 times more than the label on the bottles. In the end I decided to go with the instructions as, I thought, this would mean that the prints would develop slower and it would be easer to judge the 'snatch point'. This decision turned out to be a little annoying as it meant that the exposed paper was taking around 20 minutes to develop! Next time I'll be following the dilutions that the bottles are telling me.
Going back to the start of the process, I read that the best way to get some idea of the right exposure time was to create a normal test print and develop it in standard developer, then use two stops more time for the lith exposure. After creating a test print I decided that 12 seconds was the best exposure time. This time was doubled and doubled again (two extra stops), which took the exposure time to 48 secs.
I exposed the first sheet of paper for 48 secs then slid it into the developer and started to agitate. I had a timer close by so I could see how long the process would take. The first print was a little hairy since it took around 3 minutes before anything started appearing and at that stage all I could see was the border between the exposed and unexposed paper. After 15 mins or so the print was getting close to where I wanted it, I left it a little longer and pulled it from the developer, then used stop-bath and fixed it.
After turning the light back on (this whole process takes place under red safe-light conditions which are much harder to work under than the amber light I'm used to) the print looked pretty good, if a bit on the light side. I left the next print in the soup quite a bit longer but it turned out to be too long as the bottom of the print had no detail at all. I made one last print, this time developed longer than the first but shorter than the second, which turned out to be the best of the bunch. The image below is a scan of the print.
Lith printing seems to create a great mood, especially for this kind of image, I'm glad I tried it ans will definitely be doing more lith printing in the future as I've got a few other images that I think would work well with lith. As a side note I've kept some of the used developer (called 'old brown') as once added to fresh developer it is supposed to create slightly better tones straight away, something that it would only do after a few prints have gone through it normally.
posted by Rhys at 8:24 AM
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