Moving Forward in Reverse

If you read my article on lumen printing, this is sort of an addendum or appendix or epilogue or sequel. I had the paper cut, but for the lumen prints, I had cut it in sort of dim diffuse room light, so those pieces are really only good for lumen printing since they are a bit exposed already. So I went and cut some more 8x10 Agfa Multicontrast paper under my red led headlamp (hung about 30" above the work surface). Those pieces went directly into film holders. I had read about reversal processing film a while back (reversal processing is how slides or transparencies are made) and was sort of interested, but the bleach put me off. Most reversal process bleach is made with dichromate or permanganate compounds which are pretty toxic and best avoided if possible. So I shelved the idea of diy reversal. Then I read an interesting article about a fellow who made a working reversal bleach with just household hydrogen peroxide and lemon juice (the active ingredient there being citric acid). WHAT!? This I've got to try. I didn't have any film ready to develop, so why not try with the papers? It's more or less the same emulsion, just with a different base and in the case of RC paper like mine, a different top coat. What the heck, let's just experiment!. The article called for caffenol for the development steps, but I didn't have any of that ready to go. I did have some homemade my-tol(X-Tol knock-off), so I figured I'd just use that at stock concentration and see what happens. I read on APUG that you can develop paper with X-Tol stock for about 5 minutes, so that's where I started. Here is an overview of the process I used (note, I used 9g/L dry citric acid in place of lemon juice):

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STEP	TIME
1st developer (my-tol)	5 min
Wash	5 min
Bleach (cit. acid-hydrogen)	11:30 min
Wash	5 min
Re-exposure 300W at 1 meter	2:30 min
2nd developer (my-tol)	5 min
Wash	5 min
Fixer	5 min
Final Wash	5 min
Wetting agent	2

The first sheet I did with straight stock my-tol for 5 min in both development steps. Here it is. This is a straight color scan without any added colors, curves or contrast.

A couple of notes worth making here... I was tray developing under red light so I could see what was going on. After a couple of minutes in the first developer, the paper looked completely black. I couldn't see any image at all. I was a little worried, but I kept going because I knew that this was not necessarily an indication of failure yet. The bleach brought out a little bit of an image. I could just make out some light areas. Once I turned on the room lights for the re-exposure step, I could tell that the image was there still. It looked bad and was very low contrast. I thought, "well I guess I'll have to correct it in post." That's not what I was hoping for with this process, but sometimes that's all you get. But then I poured in the 2nd developer (same developer as I used in the first developer step) and there was the image, nice and crisp and contrasty in tan and deep black. That is when I got excited. The fixer didn't change the image since there really isn't any undeveloped silver left at this point.

The next set of exposures I did with 1:1 my-tol, thinking that I might lower the contrast a bit. Unfortunately, I was tray developing these together in an under-sized tray and so there are artifacts where the sheets contacted each other. But these are experiments, not art. What I was trying to see was whether the dilute developer would lower contrast. I don't think it did. Maybe more dilution or a different type of developer (vit. C based like caffenol or parodinal) would work. Maybe something as simple as preflashing the paper would work. These are all variables that can be explored.

So there you go. I think I really like this process. If anyone else has experience and wants to share some tips, please do!

Lumen-osity

I have not been a fan of the lumen print. Let's just get that out there. If you are, then keep reading (spoiler alert: I am now). Recently, over on Filmwasters, there was a discussion of the 'Lumenbox' which is a box camera designed with lumen printing in mind. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is a lumen print? For that matter what is a lumen??

lu•men

/'lōōmən/
noun physics
the SI unit of luminous flux, equal to the amount of light emitted per second in a unit solid angle of one steradian from a uniform source of one candela.

I'll wait while you go look up "steradian"... Now that that's out of the way, lumen printing is simply the process of using regular black and white photo printing paper as a print out paper (POP) medium. That means you get a negative without using any chemical developer. Now in this case that may not be strictly true, but we'll get to that in a minute. So why the turn around on lumen prints James?? Well, I have really only ever seen contact prints of leaves and flowers done as lumen prints. I have nothing against leaves and flowers, but the lumen contact prints just didn't appeal to me. I don't have a good reason, it's just "because". Back to the Lumenbox camera. This guy put a simple meniscus (single element) lens on the front of a box and put a piece of photo paper in the back. He did this all in daylight, knowing that the paper, without being developed, is not very light-sensitive. He pointed his camera at something stationary for 15 minutes and pulled out a photo! Now I was a little intrigued, but not enough to buy one of his cameras... just interested. Then on Filmwasters, the people were discussing the camera and lumen printing in general and who else but Joe Van Cleave posted a couple of videos (vid 1 and vid 2) about some experiments he did with this method and his own little box camera. That really piqued my interest, especially the idea of integral developer (developer embedded in the emulsion of the paper). He and the Lumenbox guy both took the image using wet paper. The idea there was to wet the paper first and then expose it and the water will allow the integral developer do its thing while the exposure is taking place. To me that seemed overly complicated and potentially messy, especially as in vid 2, Joe puts a wetted paper into his Speed Graphic. That's a risk I'm not willing to take. So I thought if the developer is there, then there's no real reason it has to be 'activated' during the exposure. The light is doing its thing to the silver halides and the developer can wait, just like with any expose/develop process. The integral developer is intended to speed up processing, not raise the effective ISO. So it shouldn't matter when you wet the paper and activate the developer. So my thought was to expose the paper dry, then dunk it in some water to let the developer do its thing. So that's what I did. I cut a piece of paper down to 4x5 and put it in a film holder and put that in my Speed Graphic. Then I set the aperture wide open to f/4.7 and put the shutter on 'T'. Then I pointed it at a ponytail palm on my patio that sits against a white wall and left it there for 20 minutes.

I scanned and inverted the dry paper right out of the camera and got this:

That's not bad! It's a little blue, but if you don't like that it could be desaturated:

So then I thought I would try some alkaline water to really get that developer kicked in the acid! I put a pinch of washing soda (pH 11!) in some water and dunked the paper. I could immediately see things starting to happen... Bad things!! There were blobs and streaks and uneven shading and, well you get the point. The integral developer had either already reacted with something else, or was breaking down in some unpredictable way. But this was the result.

At this point the negative is destroyed, but I figured it was worth one more experiment, so I put it into some paper strength fixer (Ilford Rapid Fix 1:9). I will save myself the time of uploading it and just say it didn't help. It might have lowered the contrast a bit, but the blobs and streaks were still there.

So there you go. Lumen printing in a large format camera. I suppose you could try doing optical prints from the negative produced, but it probably wouldn't work. The negative isn't dense enough to really block any light and the light of an enlarger would probably fog the negative during the process. But don't let me discourage you if you are an experimenter. My idea here was to expose dry and then get it wet to 'develop', but what I learned was that there really isn't any need to have any aqueous involvement at all. The dry lumen print stands on its own. I hope this is informative for someone. If you see some glaring error in my logic or process, please leave a comment and we can all learn together.