Photogenic Drawing Salted Paper 2

A print on plain paper may be dead, foggy, inky, sunk in the paper, &c., &c., but in its most unhappy state it does not look vulgar; there is always a certain sentiment about it, even in its worst phase of failure.

--Thomas Sutton, 1856

the salted paper print making process simply involves coating a paper (usually a matte surface) with a mixture of photo-sensitive materials.

"Salted paper can only be contact printed. For this reason a 4x5 or larger negative is usually preferred. A good salted paper print requires a dense negative with good shadow detail. The best negatives are slightly overexposed and overdeveloped. The reason for this is that salted paper has a self-masking printing-out image. This means that the thin areas of the negative quickly darken and block light from reaching the lower layers of emulsion, preventing detail from forming. The result is the shadow areas lose separation the longer they're exposed. Denser shadow areas with more detail will slow down this tendency to self-mask. The masking effect is negligible in the lighter tones."

After Henry Fox Talbot's first successful use of silver chloride photographic paper in 1835, variations to his method soon followed. In 1839 Herschel suggested that instead of fixing the paper with a salt solution, hypo should be used. They found that this change made the prints more successfully stable to light and left the highlights pure while rather than a slightly light purplish color that did not give the most desirable contrast.

In the late 1840's photographers began to notice that although Talbot was using only a salt solution to make his paper, his prints were turning out a more reddish brown color than those of the French photographers. It was later discovered that English paper. like that which Talbot was using, was sized by the manufacturer with a gelatin material. After researching this color change and the gelatin method more carefully, it was found that adding a neutral citrate would also cause a change in the color of the final prints, making them more reddish and brighter.
Later on, starch papers became more popular and nearly wiped out the demand for plain salted papers. Arrowroot paper being the most used, it is a salted paper in which the binding material is a paste that is made from boiled arrowroot starch. The arrowroot produced a richer print and allowed for much more detail.

From Wilson's Cyclopaedic Photography: A Complete Handbook of the Terms, Processes, Formulae and Appliances Available in Photography

Previous to the mid 1850's only matte prints were popular, but soon the use of albumen paper began to grow and there was a rise in demand for glossy prints. Invented in 1850 by Louis Desire Blanquart-Evrard, the method used albumen from egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper. The process became one of the most popular, and was commonly used for the carte de visite, small 'trading cards' that were popular among friends and often photographs of prominent persons, such as war heros or celebrities, or of themselves.

Step by step albumen process

"Albumen prints are a variety of photographic paper print in which a finely divided silver and gold image is dispersed in a matrix of egg white. Such prints constitute by far the largest category of objects in 19th century photographic collections. Albumen paper became the most widely used photographic printing material about 1855, and remained so until 1895; it did not disappear completely from photographic practice until the 1920's."

Albumen print from 1885 of Niagara Falls

For our negatives in class, we made three different solutions to coat the paper.

The arrowroot coating consisted of:

4g arrowroot

119mL water

4g NaCl

.5g citric acid

the water was heated and an arrowroot paste (the arrowroot mixed with a small amount of water) was mixed in along with the NaCl and citric acid. It was then allowed to cool

Two pieces of Canson water color paper were coated with two coates of the arrowroot

The gelatin coating recipe was as follows:

125mL water

1g gelatin

2.5g citric acid

2.5 g NaCl

the mixture was heated in a double boiler and two coats were applied warm to two pieces of Canson water color paper.

The albumen was made as a group and consisted of:

500mL egg white

3mL vinegar

7.5g NaCl

after shaking it to a white froth and leaving it for two days until the next class, the albumen was strained through cheese cloth into a glass dish. The papers were folded into "boats" and dipped into the albumen mixture and hung to dry (for one coating) This was done with two pieces of stonehenge 100% rag paper. Another two pieces of the same paper were given a second coating of albumen after drying, being dipped into a alcohol bath, drying again, and then dipped a second time into the albumen. All four papers were left with a glossy finish upon drying, with the double coated papers being the most glossy.

We then used our transparency negatives (because it was too cloudy for the paper ones) to expose the paper. Each paper was first coated with two coats of silver solution in order to activate the photosensitive properties of the coating. we then placed the paper and negative in a frame with the coated side touching the inked side of the transparency, and brought them outside. immediately we were able to see results, but because it was a cloudy day, they took about ten minutes to properly expose.

The papers were then brought inside and fixed with solutions of hypo and a wash.

Arrowroot prints on top and the bottom is gelatin. Top had the most contrast but wasn't coated as well, same with the middle one. Because of this it was hard to distinguish differences in detail.

The previous class we tested the affect of using colored filters on the plain salted paper. Red, Blue, and Yellow cellophane was applied to one paper and the whole page was taken outside to be exposed.

The blue filter let the most light through, exposing the paper and producing a medium brownish color. The red filter blocked most of the light, only allowing it to be slightly exposed. The yellow filter blocked all of the light and left it white.

Camera Obscura

the idea of the camera obscura had been around for centuries, as far back as 300 B.C. where philosophers noted might traveling through small openings and projecting shapes on the ground. In the 10th century, an Arabian scholar wrote about what is essentially a camera obscura, explaining how,
"The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle. The image of the sun shows this peculiarity only when the hole is very small. When the hole is enlarged, the picture changes... ."

This is a simple way of describing how the camera works. As light squeezes through a small opening, it is projected back onto a wall or whatever is at the opposite end of the hole. The image is seen upside down and inverted because of the way that light travels. The size of the pinhole determines how sharp the resulting image is. Generally, the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image, but taking into account the image that is being projected and how far away the scene is from the hole, and how far the wall that is being projected onto is from the hole, a calculation can be done to determine the proper size for the pinhole.
It was around the mid fifteenth, early sixteenth century when the idea of the camera obscura began to be thought of as an aid for drawing. Daniel Barbero, a Venetian man, made this announcement to the public:


"Close all shutters and doors until no light enters the camera except through the lens, and opposite hold a piece of paper, which you move forward and backward until the scene appears in the sharpest detail. There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colours and shadows and motion, the clouds, the water twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it and delicately colour it from nature."

Fifteen years after Da Vinci's death in 1519, "Porta, a Native of Naples, constructed a small model of the dark chamber, which to all intents and purposes is the camera of to-day without the lens. Ever since then it must assuredly have occured to the mind of many a search that there might be some means of perpetuating the fleeting pictures on teh wall of the camera obscura; but the secrest took nearly three centuries to discover; otherwise, instead of dating from the nineteenth, photography might have dated form the sixteenth century."

From about the mid sixteenth century and onward, artists began to use the camera obscura to their benefit, although some thought that it was considered a form of cheating and therefore a disgrace to the art world.
The cameras also became a source of entertainment, small buildings placed in public areas where one could go and sit inside in order to see the image outside "magically" projected for them.

Nowadays, making pinhole cameras and camera obscuras is a fun pastime and do it yourself project for just about anyone, due to its simplicity. It is also an easy way to introduce the basics of photography. Many artists also enjoy the aesthetic look of the pinhole camera and the strange yet tantalizing images that can be produced from projecting a landscape on a wall with the camera obscura, and continue to use them and perfect their technique to make beautiful images.

Abelardo Morell does some really amazing lanscape/cityscape camera obscura photography

It would be amazing if I had the opportunity to try something like this out this summer while I am in Italy

As for my own camera obscura that I made for class, I unfortunately did not take any pictures of it beforehand, and my photographer boyfriend wanted to experiment with it after class, so it is now mostly in shambles. Aside from that, it was really simple to make and actually worked more successfully than I had expected.

I started out by taking the lens, (really a plastic magnifying glass) and holding it up to my wall with the light from the window shining behind me. By moving the lens back and forth I eventually found that sweet spot where the image of the window and the trees outside was in focus on the wall. I then measured that distance, which came out to be just over three and a half inches.

The lens basically uses refraction to bend the light coming in and focus it in order to form the image on the wall. when using a simple pinhole, it is nearly impossible to get a perfectly in focus image from the pinhole, because although the exact size of the hole can be calculated, the size will always be small and very difficult to perfectly measure, however, the image can appear, although slightly blurry, on a very large surface and still be recognizable. with a lens, there is a much shorter margin for error, and i noticed that people who were slightly off with their depth of field measurement were not able to produce an image at all.

Next, I cut up and taped an old granola bar box and made it so that the open end, where the image would be projected, was three and a half inches from the front of the box, where the lens would be. Next I just cut a hole in the front of the box slightly smaller than the size of the lens, and taped the lens over it. I originally just had a cardboard flap at the back of the box where the image projected, but I wanted it to be easier to see, so I taped part of a white plastic grocery bag over the back which acted as a sort of screen for the image to project onto. It actually worked amazingly well, and was almost perfectly in focus.