My First Salt Prints
Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:20AM Another weekend, another trip to David’s for more alternative process fun. This time our process was salt prints, and as with previous trips he was gracious enough to pre-test the process and get some of the sheets of paper salted before I arrived. All I had to do was coat the paper with the silver emulsion, expose the digital negatives (16 minute exposure), then rinse, tone, fix, and rinse.
Here’s the first print:
First Beach, WA. Salt print, then gold toned for 4 minutes.
We were a little disappointed at how this one turned out. It looks like either the paper fogged a bit during coating or that the curve was a little off for the digital negative. The highlights look better in the scanned image than they do on paper (they’re a little too dark for my taste).
Here’s the second print I made:
Zion National Park. Salt print, un-toned.
This print is a home run. You can’t tell at all from the scan but it’s amazing in person. Beautiful tonal range, lovely highlights, and cool chocolaty shadows. I am very, very, very happy with how it worked out.
Salt printing is pretty darn cool. It’s not that much different than traditional gelatin silver printing, but the tones… wow.
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I wish I could see these prints in reality. Web copies can't represent whats in them. What I wonder is: Would it work to use an inkjet printer to spray the Silver Salt onto the paper instead of using a digital negative? that should save silver and allow for some interesting possibilities. I have no ideas about head clogging or printer corrosion though ...