jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (04/27/85)
This is a question I have asked literally dozens of photographers, but have
not yet found an answer.
About 10 years ago, when I was first starting out in photography (in high
school), I took a course taught at my high school by the mother of one of
the students. One day in the course, we took a field trip to her house to
see her darkroom.
On the wall in her hallway, she had many very unusual black&white prints.
What was unusual about them was that they were covered with colored swirls,
resembling the patterns that used to be printed on the edges of books a long
time ago. The colors were those you see on tarnished silver.
(These were fairly normal prints otherwise, i.e., they contained pictures
of various things, not just the swirls; the swirls just colored in the
picture.)
We asked her how she did it, but she refused to tell us; she claimed that
she had discovered it and was now trying to patent the process. At the time
I was somewhat skeptical; but since that time, I have found no one who knows
how to do it.
I have accidentally produced the colors myself sometimes; if you are
developing a piece of B&W film and some of the developer gets trapped
against the film through the stop bath and fixer, it produces one of the
colors, usually red or blue. But I have never been able to do it on a print,
nor have I been able to produce the swirls.
So my question is... how is it done? Has anybody out there ever seen this
process before? I suspect it produces the same thing that tarnish on silver
is; but how to do it eludes me.
--
Full-Name: J. Eric Roskos
UUCP: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer
US Mail: MS 795; Perkin-Elmer SDC;
2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642wunder@wdl1.UUCP (05/10/85)
I once left a print in the fixer for about a day (this was an accident), and all the whites turned silver, with weird metallic rainbow colors. I never tried to repeat the "process", but the print seems kind of stable -- last time that I looked at it, the silver was still there. Maybe I'll go home and look at it carefully. It has been about six or seven years since that print was FIXED. wunder