It’s only Wednesday, but I’m already exhausted! I’ve been printing all day every day this week: 8 hours on Monday, 7 Tuesday, and 10 today.

Monday was about experimentation: trying to improve the quality of my kallitypes on Stonehenge paper (trying to reduce my cost per print, since my preferred paper is handmade and imported from France); using fumed silica; working with different developers; experimenting with selenium toner for kallitypes. No good prints came of it. The prints got progressively worse through the day, and eventually I realized that the (sodium acetate, ammonium citrate, and tartaric acid) developer I mixed a year ago had finally become depleted (likely, too acidic). But in the process, I learned a bit.

Tuesday was about getting back on track: switching to things that I knew worked and applying what I learned on Monday. I fell back to Arches hot pressed 140# paper (which is an excellent paper for Kallitypes). I stuck with Henry Hall’s 1903 developer (sodium acetate and tartaric acid), which works more consistently. And I printed one negative over and over, trying to understand exactly what I had learned on Monday. The shot here is from yesterday’s printing run; it’s the final culmination of all of the variables that I had in play on Monday.

Today was about generating prints using my newest learned methods. I have 9 more kallitypes drying: some toned with selenium, some toned with gold.

So, back to this shot: this is Madame Corsetiere of Dragontown Corsets, shot backstage at the recent Pennsylvania Burlesque Festival. Printed on Arches 140# hot pressed block; toned with gold.