Vahe's Streets : Silver-gelatin Prints From Traditional Film

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Silver-gelatin Prints From Traditional Film

I have been a traditionalist when it comes to using film – always in B&W, always in the darkroom using a 1950’s HANSA enlarger and decade old solution trays. The only experimentation I have enjoyed to the enlarger is to replace enlarger lenses with 39mm Leica screw-mount camera lenses by changing the mounting plate. This allows me to print medium format negatives with either a wide angle or zoomed/cropped views.

But of course my “primitive” manipulations in the darkroom have no comparison with what digital printers and software can allow photographers to achieve. However, there is one approach that seems to intersect between both the darkroom and digital worlds – that of getting silver-gelatin prints using traditional film.

I was reading a well written article by Chris Woodhouse in Photo Technique Magazine⁽¹⁾. Although published in 2010, it piqued my interest in trying to duplicate some of the process in my darkroom, and see if a silver-gelatin print would enhance the impression of an otherwise “uneventful” picture.

First a bit of background: the silver-gelatin printing process is not new. In fact it was in 1871 when Richard L. Maddox first discovered it by coating a suspension of silver salts in gelatin upon glass. With some improvements that suspension could later be coated on plastic or paper. The main advantage of the silver-gelatin process compared to the collodion wet-plate process was that the silver-gelatin coated surfaces (glass, paper, etc) could be stored much longer than the wet-plates that needed to be developed immediately after exposure. So, a photographer could load his mule with silver-gelatin plates and climb mountains for weeks taking pictures and not having to develop them immediately!

Well, without loading my mule with any plates, I chose a picture from the Inner Harbor of Baltimore to experiment with.

I will not go into describing the process as it is very well detailed in the link I provide below. Suffice it to say that the final product is quite different from the original. Of course this is the modern day approach to silver-gelatin printing but still, it does bring some nostalgia.

The question is: what kind of photographs would lend themselves to a better expression if printed in silver-gelatin?

I leave it to the reader to decide by looking at the original B&W print by comparing it to the silver-gelatin output: