eman
7-Feb-2012, 13:37
I prefer warm tone papers and, since the demise of Forte, I've been looking for a good replacement. Clients for the most part don't ask for warm tone papers so I wasn't highly motivated.
Recently a well known portrait shooter here contacted me about printing his work and so I began testing. I had tried Ilford's WT but didn't particularly like it as it isn't that warm. First paper I tested was Foma's WT paper and that looked good but is really slow.
The next paper I tried is Oriental's WT paper and that, so far, does the trick. Compared side by side to Foma's WT paper it looks nearly identical, (both processed in Ansco 115 1:5 or 1:4) except that Oriental's paper has a slightly warmer base. Ilford's barely looks warm next to those papers processed in 115 as well.
I've not put Oriental WT through it's paces yet as the image size I've been printing is 6" max from 2 1/4 and Type 55 negs, so I don't have a feel for the speed of the paper at this point.
Because Foma's crimp sheet states that it's mainly made for contact printing, my guess is that Oriental WT is faster. I had some dense 35mm negs I printed on Foma WT 11x14 and had exposures of 99 secs or more @5.6 which is a wider aperture than I like to print at. If in the same situation trying to print 16x20 it might be just too long an exposure to deal with using Foma WT.
The reason I'm posting this is that when I was trying to decide what paper to try out, there weren't many posts about Oriental WT so I thought I should give my impressions. I've used Ansco 115 for years when printing w/warm papers, esp. Forte's and found that the only developer warmer was the Zonal Pro WT developer which I assume is now gone as well. Now there's a formula I'd like to find!
Recently a well known portrait shooter here contacted me about printing his work and so I began testing. I had tried Ilford's WT but didn't particularly like it as it isn't that warm. First paper I tested was Foma's WT paper and that looked good but is really slow.
The next paper I tried is Oriental's WT paper and that, so far, does the trick. Compared side by side to Foma's WT paper it looks nearly identical, (both processed in Ansco 115 1:5 or 1:4) except that Oriental's paper has a slightly warmer base. Ilford's barely looks warm next to those papers processed in 115 as well.
I've not put Oriental WT through it's paces yet as the image size I've been printing is 6" max from 2 1/4 and Type 55 negs, so I don't have a feel for the speed of the paper at this point.
Because Foma's crimp sheet states that it's mainly made for contact printing, my guess is that Oriental WT is faster. I had some dense 35mm negs I printed on Foma WT 11x14 and had exposures of 99 secs or more @5.6 which is a wider aperture than I like to print at. If in the same situation trying to print 16x20 it might be just too long an exposure to deal with using Foma WT.
The reason I'm posting this is that when I was trying to decide what paper to try out, there weren't many posts about Oriental WT so I thought I should give my impressions. I've used Ansco 115 for years when printing w/warm papers, esp. Forte's and found that the only developer warmer was the Zonal Pro WT developer which I assume is now gone as well. Now there's a formula I'd like to find!