easiest alt process

[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.

[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).