Printing Thoughts

Well over the last week off I managed to put 20+ hours of printing, not bad considering most of my previous weeks off I did no printing at all. I learned a few things this week:

- I can't leave my prints soaking for more than a day without some emulsion peeling. I had my prints soaking for about 1 day and 1/2 and ended up losing  3 of them because of emulsion damage, the rest look fine. From now on I will leave my prints wet for a maximum of 24 hours.

- Ilford normal/cool tone paper bleaches poorly. I used twice the concentrate for maybe twice as long as I do with the warmtone variety of Ilford paper but did not get much in the way of bleaching done. The paper seems to be resistant to bleaching, kind of strange how the warm tone paper bleaches nicely but the normal/cool tone stuff does not. This is unfortunate, I might have to look for another kind of paper to do my cool tone printing on because I love bleaching!

The most important thing I was reminded of this week is how good it feels to have a beautiful print floating in the fix/wash/toner, what a great f-cking feeling! To create something from nothing, to see it in its final formal staring back up at you, the highest of highs!