Last session in the studio for 2023, the alternative was Christmas shopping in Manchester with family…
I’ve had this ADOX RA4 colour chemistry developer and blix in the darkroom fridge for a while now. So I’ve split the concentrate down into smaller bottles with no air gap, hoping it’ll last a little longer. This kit makes 2.5 litres of working solution. I mixed up smaller solutions for today from the odd ammount remaining.
I’ve not used the Adox chems before, but they were a good price on Ebay. My last RA4 chems were by Kodak and kindly gifted to me by Chris Gries.
I’m using Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper again, torn into 5×4 inch sheets from 10×8, and shot in the Ross sliding box camera.
I managed to find my old colour reversal filter pack from previous tests with the Kodak chems.
This time of year, I have to use the CFL kit as decent daylight is rather limited.
Exposure test strips always throw me with Colour reversal, the more exposure the lighter it gets. Final exposure was 7 seconds lens wide open. So about ISO 2.
It’s then a careful adjustment of exposure and filtration to get an acceptable print.
Here’s a sheet of paper following a pre wash (water), development (Ilford PQ Universal), and acid stopbath in complete darkness. I use my handy little 5×4 drum processor for this.
Then, it was exposed to daylight and developed with RA4 dev and blix, three minutes in each. All chems room temperature.
You then start to adjust filtration to get rid of colour casts. It can get very frustrating, and vigorous notetaking is needed.
My filter pack contains a Tiffen 85B glass filter and a selection of Cibachrome filters and sits behind the lens, in camera.
A little too yellow, add a Y30 filter to the pack and shoot another.
Change one thing too far and introduce a different colour cast. Or get it looking good in the highlights and the shadows of a different material changes colour. It’s so frustrating but so much fun.
I’ll be revisting my filtration pack in the New Year as I think I just kept adding rather than swapping. It soon got confusing. Oh and remember to re focus the lens.