Last night I finally got the chance to tackle making platinum and palladium prints for my book project. I chose the process because I liked the overal image texture from the emulsion application, but all in all I’ve only ever made one palladium print in my life. After not having been in a darkroom for at least a year, I was stumbling around like a drunk idiot for about 2 hours, at which point I finally got into the groove.
We, meaning Margaret and I, printed from about 830 until 2 in the morning and I am pretty sure I only managed to get one useable print. About half way through this, I finally remembered what Cheryl had told me about printing with platinum: Do a set of palladium prints first, and THEN do platinum and palladium. The print times and solution amounts are the same for both processes, so what I should have done was figured out my exposures and the spreading of the solution with the cheap stuff first. Instead, I blew through a 10 ml bottle of platinum solution last night, which runs $57. Initially, I had some problems with spreading the mixture onto the paper and ended up making a few prints that had large-ish white spots in them. Of course I also have one negative that is going to be a pain to print, so that one didn’t turn out at all.
I finally got the hang of coating the paper though, since apparently I was pushing some of the chemical off the edge of the paper vs. pushing it around the paper. Today, I will go get my prints off of the drying rack, just to see what they really looked like. Margaret was doing palladium prints, and half way through I really started doubting my choice of using platinum, since all of her prints turned out really well and mine…well….
So, this morning I will be purchasing some replacement chemicals. I think after last night, I’m going to go with a larger bottle of solution #3: 25 ml for $142.50.