An experimental evening at the lab
One day a friend brought some very interesting black & white, super fast (ISO 160), paper to our lab. It is normally used in Russian photo booths. He experimented with indoor pinhole camera portraits which worked flawlessly with the paper. The results were amazing. In the meantime I tried to figure out how and if the paper performs in the lith process. I was told the paper had a lot of silver in the emulsion. Why not giving it a shot?
I used a very dense 35mm film negative which normally would take at least a minute of exposure, aperture wide open, on the normal fomatone paper I would have used normally.
In the end I exposed it only 4 seconds! In the lith bath it took some time for the development to start but then it developed quickly. What is unique for the paper are the cloudy patches that showed up out of nowhere. I was lucky that the black spots match the picture well. In other shots they were very disturbing.
I don’t know where my friend got that mysterious paper. It is not a fibre paper but for a PE paper it feels very valuable. The color of the paper is not white, more like bone or cream. In the lith process it gets a beautiful warm tone in the lights. I really like the Russian mystery paper. But only in the lith process. The results in the normal process were rather average.
about the shot
I took the picture in November 2018 in the Blue Mountains, Australia with my Nikon FM2 and the good old 28mm Nikkor on a Kodak TMAX 400, exposed @400 ISO, developed in XTOL.
