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.