Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Better Photos using salt as fixer

My most seen photograph in Flickr is the one shown below. I used a Holga camera 120GN, Parodinal as developer and salt as fixer. This picture is from a black and white film, Fomapan 100 ISO, digitized with a cheap Olympus FE4050 and treated in GIMP. Incredible, I still can't believe how that was possible

Black and White like color
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The last photos I made with the same film, better quality cameras, and using the same developer but normal fixer of ammonium thiosulfate, don't look so good. I came to the conclusion, comparing the negatives, that the films fixed with salt are much more transparent, they have no fog at all and this, alone, is a reason for me to start using salt regularly as fixer. OK, it needs time, it needs temperature. But I have both, time and how to keep the bath warm. 3 hours are enough to fix with very concentrated salt, minimum 300 g / liter.

Spring comming
The same photo but desaturated of color.

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