easiest alt process

[BetterSense]

Primarily because I stress about materials being discontinued, i think it would be good to dabble in some kind of homemade process. I read some stuff from Bostick and Sullivan that makes DIY gelatin emulsions seem reasonably achievable, if slow and blue-sensitive. Yet collodian seems more popular. Is this because collodian is really easier, or is it because it is conceptually further from silved gelatin which, after all, you can buy?

[peter schrager]

I did the same about 15 years ago and learned platinum/palladium for the same reasons. we have some really good materials and some excellent hybrid methods available. just do your art
sorry I did not directly answer your question
best, peter

[Wayne]

Making dry plates with liquid emulsion (I've not made DIY) and Van Dyke Brown prints are both quite simple and easy. I don't think DIY dry plate emulsion would be much harder. I don't think ease has anything to do with wet plate collodion's popularity.

[David Schaller]

Cyanotype. There is an article in the New York Times today about the resurgence of cyanotype. Cheap, easy and fun.

[bob carnie]

I'm with Peter on this - as well you can add gum over

I did the same about 15 years ago and learned platinum/palladium for the same reasons. we have some really good materials and some excellent hybrid methods available. just do your art
sorry I did not directly answer your question
best, peter

[Donald Qualls]

I've read, fairly recently (within the past year) an extensive web site by a woman in Oregon who is making her own ISO 25 orthochromatic emulsion, coating on glass and film. The tonality seems very nice, though her material seems to be marred with what looks like "snow" -- randomly distributed white (in positive) dots that I presume come from overgrown halide crystals that self-fog or are much more sensitive than the overall run in a given batch; if that's the case, reversal processing should correct that issue, but I don't know that she's tried it. She's been able to get pretty consistent speed, and the dye for sensitizing to green is neither toxic nor costly (yellow food coloring!). I think we'll be able to count on making our own emulsion, at least to this level, for as long as we can get chemicals.

I make my developers from either instant coffee (unlikely to vanish, as there are seemingly a lot of caffeine addicts with no sense of taste or smell) and generic acetaminophen, pool chemicals, vitamin C powder, laundry soda, and drain opening lye (not all together; that's five different developers). Stop bath can be slightly diluted white distilled vinegar or plain water, and fixer can be made from another pool chemical.

Traditional cyanotype should remain accessible indefinitely, though I expect potassium dichromate (contrast additive) will eventually become hard to get; it's already almost inaccessible in the EU due to environmental laws. Ware's New Cyanotype is a little more exotic, but should still be possible on the long term, though it may get more expensive. Van Dyke Brown and salted paper are both easy, if more expensive than cyanotype, and as long as we can get dichromate, gum will be an option -- even tri-color gum, as long as we're willing to use digitally printed negatives (since homemade emulsion is unlikely ever to be fully panchromatic, because of the rarity and expense of the required dyes, color separation on homemade emulsion may remain impractical, though two-color Technicolor worked pretty well back in the 1930s).

[Michael E]

...generic acetaminophen, pool chemicals, vitamin C powder, laundry soda, and drain opening lye (not all together; that's five different developers). Stop bath can be slightly diluted white distilled vinegar or plain water, and fixer can be made from another pool chemical.

If you buy all that together, you're bound to be arrested as a possible terrorist :-)

I'm sure that by the time our photography chemicals have been banned for environmental reasons, several products from your list will be gone as well.

[Tin Can]

After watching Bob Carnie's latest video I am sold on trying PP prints. Look for it.

Then I read a lot more, and found the obvious reason for all those water bathes.

Soon new Cone inks for the Epson 1430 and even I may be able to do it. :)

[pdh]

potassium dichromate (contrast additive) ... [is] already almost inaccessible in the EU due to environmental laws. .

This is often repeated, even by EU residents, but unfortunately (or fortunately) the facts get in the way of a scare story: I could go to my 'puter right now and order dichromate in almost any quantity I like for immediate delivery without any questions asked.

I'm a private individual, not a company or a lab or a school or an anything else, and I live in the UK.

[Nodda Duma]

I just went down the path of doing DIY dry plate emulsion. It is fairly straightforward... if you can cook and you have a darkroom, then you can do this.

The trickiest part is controlling temperature accurately. What made it easy for me is that I have a PID controlled heated water bath that I had previously set up for developing slide film. If you can control temperature, then the next tricky part is getting the emulsion on the glass plate w/o defects. The technical challenges are part of the fun for me, so I don't consider them necessarily difficult.

[Tin Can]

I just went down the path of doing DIY dry plate emulsion. It is fairly straightforward... if you can cook and you have a darkroom, then you can do this.

The trickiest part is controlling temperature accurately. What made it easy for me is that I have a PID controlled heated water bath that I had previously set up for developing slide film. If you can control temperature, then the next tricky part is getting the emulsion on the glass plate w/o defects. The technical challenges are part of the fun for me, so I don't consider them necessarily difficult.

Great, I think the tech challenge is important. I will be trying soon. I don't have PID at the water bath, but I think my Hass temp controller can stabilize if I run it long enough. It's 8 feet away.

I spent a lot of my career tuning industrial control loops on Dyno engines, which weren't stable with our DIY gear.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Is there any source for POP today?

When I was poor, POP was cheap - a good coincidence and now at old age, it is once again attractive to me.
.

[mdm]

Salt printing is really easy and fast. coat salt and sodium citrate using a rod, dry with a hair dryer, coat silver nitrate with a rod, dry with a hair dryer. 2ml solution for an 8x10 print area. Expose. Wash, salt solution, tone, fix, wash. You can see your print as it exposes, dont do any processing if you like and just scan straight out of the printing frame, keep unprocessed prints in the dark and they last a while. Get Ellie Youngs book, its a great time saver.

[Wayne]

Anthotypes. Pulverize a beet or flowers or other vegetable matter, strain it, spread the squeazings on paper, stick the leaves or whatever you please on it and expose it to the sun for a few days.

[Greg]

Agree with Cyanotype as being the easiest but Salt prints I found much, much more fulfilling. Get "THE SALT PRINT MANUAL" by Ellie Young. Well worth the $$. Anthotypes are great but one of my students found it to be anything but archival... he used blueberries. Problem is how to "fix" the image for permanence.

Greg

[Willie]

After watching Bob Carnie's latest video I am sold on trying PP prints. Look for it.

Then I read a lot more, and found the obvious reason for all those water bathes.

Soon new Cone inks for the Epson 1430 and even I may be able to do it. :)

PP - Parcel Post? Or Pt/Pd printing?

[Mark Sampson]

To (mis)quote President Kennedy about going to the moon; "we don't do this because it's easy, we do it because it's hard." Same with alt-processes. None of them are as simple or easy as industry-based silver photography. Those materials are not going to disappear tomorrow, and the fear of their loss should not drive you to hand-made methods. The only reasons to do so are that you enjoy doing the work and like the way your pictures look when you make them that way.

[Wayne]

PP - Parcel Post? Or Pt/Pd printing?

My money says Randy has already tried Parcel Post

[mdm]

Have'nt made one of theese in years but this was a quick diversion this AM. From an X100 file, using the tele adapter, and printed on pictorico using the Piezography Carbon methodology 3 curve. Berger cot 320 with gelatine and sodium citrate in the salt solution, pink himalayan salt. coated with a rod. gold borax toner. The dry print is darker and much colder. Image is about 9x13 inches.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f5TqqewdH6o/Vrgr73q1F6I/AAAAAAAACfU/wW2BRrQs58I/s1600/IMG_0389.JPG

[Donald Qualls]

If you buy all that together, you're bound to be arrested as a possible terrorist :-)

I'm sure that by the time our photography chemicals have been banned for environmental reasons, several products from your list will be gone as well.

You might be right -- though I can see these things requiring ID or having quantity limits (and resulting prohibitive pricing) long before they become completely unavailable. Simple strike-anywhere matches fell to the "war on drugs" after more than a hundred years of production; now they're back, but the chemistry is different and they cost more. I see lye getting hard to obtain even now -- lots of grocery stores (who used to carry it among cleaning supplies) have dropped it. Laundry soda is in the same boat -- and without those two all my homemade developers would at the least require reformulation (I doubt I could make Parodinal with a less powerful alkali; that's the driver for the reaction that strips the acetyl group off the acetaminophen, but I could probably make a version of Caffenol with borax for alkali -- until that cleaning chemical, too, vanishes from shelves).

[barnacle]

I have to admit that's why I played around qualifying various caffenol recipes four or five years ago - because I was concerned that chemistry was getting hard to find in the UK. It was faintly embarrassing to go into Jessops - a large UK supplier whom I had used over the counter for years - to be told they no longer supplied *film*, let alone chemistry or papers. They went bust a couple of years ago.

Neil

[DKirk]

I have to admit that's why I played around qualifying various caffenol recipes four or five years ago - because I was concerned that chemistry was getting hard to find in the UK. It was faintly embarrassing to go into Jessops - a large UK supplier whom I had used over the counter for years - to be told they no longer supplied *film*, let alone chemistry or papers. They went bust a couple of years ago.

Neil

The one just by Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow still has film (though I did go over the various ones we had in store with the Customer, when I was in working with Canon at Christmas. . . ), since Peter Jones took them over they have smaller stores and fewer there of, though the ones in cities/towns that have a photography college tend to have some students as staff - the bulk of the Glasgow store are quite well versed in cameras, though primarily digital - and this latest thing that fuji are doing with the instax cameras :p

[Fr. Mark]

New Cyanotype by Dr. Mike ware. Very reliable excellent tonal range, contrast control, inexpensive especially from bulk chemicals. Good paper is more expensive than the chemicals, I think. Works with camera or inkjet negatives.

The light farm has emulsion instructions (Azo paper, gas light paper, dry plates and film, blue Ortho and pan fillip to 100 speed, IIRC. author primarily Denise Ross who is a member here I think.