Entropy, Fotospeed and the meaning of warmth

Entropy: a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder

Entropy is a fascinating thing. Basically, in the sense I'm meaning it here, there is only one orderly state and entropy is the movement away from that state towards a near infinitude of others. That always means a move towards less order. It's a way of explaining to teenagers why they have to put in regular effort to make sure their bedroom remains reasonably tidy. It also explains why your house needs maintenance from time-to-time.

I've just started printing again after quite a lay-off and I'm finding that entropy, of a sort, seems to be playing a role in what I'm producing. In my view, there is a kind of printing entropy. There is only one perfect print but a near infinitude of ways of producing a less than perfect print. Rather than just zeroing in on the perfect print and getting on with the rest of my life, I seem drawn to exploring all the ways I can produce the flawed versions. It's doing my head in somewhat.

It's a common enough position for me to find myself in after a break from printing. Years back, I considered myself to be a pretty decent printer but now it takes me a few sessions to get my eye in. I'm not there yet after a darkroom hiatus lasting about six months. I've had quite a few annoying disasters in recent days. So near and yet so far with some prints, too. There have been a few 12x16 prints that I thought were spot on only for something to reveal itself once I'd taken them out of the fixer for viewing. Frustrating isn't the word, especially when one of those "not quite" prints is the last one of a particular printing session. 

To be honest, the print shown here wasn't too bad from that point of view. It's my shot of Allonby that appeared a couple of weeks ago. The earlier version was a scan from the 120 negative. It was easy to make a few clicks in Photoshop and get it looking pretty much the way I wanted. It's a lot harder in the darkroom.

The first test strip (above) was to get a basic exposure for the house that's the main point of interest in the image. That was easy enough but you'll notice that there's hardly any detail in the sky or foreground when the exposure for the house is about right.That means some burning in and the house breaking through the horizon means this is likely to be a tricky operation.

The artful dodger. Not exactly Silver Efex Pro, is it?

I decided a mask was necessary to shield the house when I was giving the extra burn in time. Some people go to great lengths to produce a very accurate mask - effectively an exact outline of the house and the area to be held back - but my experience is that this can be a very time-consuming and pernickety affair. One way of doing this is to put two piles of books either side of the easel, rest a piece of card over them and trace the outline of the house, in this case, onto it. This is accurately cut out and carefully positioned the same way when it comes to making the print.

Have you heard of the Scottish reputation for precision engineering?

I don't have the patience for that so I did a rough and ready mask, holding the card in place with my left hand and scribbling the outline of the house onto it with my right. This was hacked out with a pair of scissors. No precision job this: just something to ritualistically wave about. As long as the card is kept on the move this is normally a reliable way of burning in a sky without making it too obvious.

The second test strip (above) gave me an exposure for the sky and foreground and I set to the print with mask in hand. That's the result below.

You'll see that the right hand side of the sky is quite a bit lighter - that's where the sun was - so that necessitated another test strip (below) on the right hand side to see if I could get a time to balance up the sky.

That's the final print, which worked out not too badly, at the top of the post. The two sides of the sky are fine and the mask has done a reasonable job. There's a little bit of sky overspill onto the roof of the house but not as much as you might think. If you have a look at the house exposure test strip you can see that the front roof line is in reality quite a bit darker than the slates further down which gives the impression that it's been darkened more in the burning in than is actually the case.

On the technical side, this was a Delta 100 negative from the Rollei SL66E, developed in Fotospeed FD10. The print was made on Fotospeed's RCVC glossy paper and developed in their WT10 warm tone developer. The print - it's about 11x11 inches - is too big for my flatbed scanner so it had to be scanned in two halves and stitched together in Photoshop so if you see a couple of pixels somewhere that don't line up exactly you'll know why.

The Fotospeed paper is OK and pretty much like other RC paper I've used. Which means that it just doesn't feel, handle or look like fibre-based and I don't think I'll be going down the resin coated route again. I wanted to try the combination of the paper and WT10 to see how warm the print would be having read good things about it. Print tones are nearly always very subtle but I scanned the print in colour to give you an idea of the warmth that can be achieved.

It would be possible to produce a slightly warmer print than this by diluting the developer more and warming it up a little beyond the usual 20c. Fotospeed say it can be diluted at 1+9, 1+19 and 1+29 with the weaker solutions resulting in more warmth but, obviously, capable of producing fewer prints before exhaustion. I started off at 1+19 but didn't feel I was getting a good black despite sticking to Fotospeed's time and temperature suggestions. I switched to 1+9 and things improved.

The Fotospeed paper is one of the few RC papers that will tone readily in selenium and this might be an easier way of warming up the image. I haven't used selenium for a long time, though, and never much liked it's toxic nature. It's OK if used sensibly but the fumes at stronger dilutions are such that, not having an air extraction system above my wet bench, I'd only be comfortable using it outdoors.

I'd rather go down the Bill Schwab/Michael Kenna route to achieve greater warmth. They lightly bleach the highlights and bathe them in a weak sepia toner which just warms them up without any of the over-the-top effects associated with sepia. They also tone them in selenium afterwards but what do they know. For an idea of how subtle the various print tones are with the Fotospeed paper, the first print below is the colour scan and the one beneath it a greyscale scan

Overall, then, not a bad effort as far as the Allonby print is concerned. But you should have seen some of the subsequent prints from that session. Or, rather, it's better that you don't. Talk about print entropy...