[Craig Tuffin]

Ok, I’ve finally had a win! I’ll fill you all in just in case you experience this sometime.

At the end of this my last day testing, I finally performed a bromine/mercury quadrat test. The result is an extremely informative image (ungilded plate of course). It ends up I was fuming with my bromine and developing far too long. Reducing my bromine times significantly (from 50 sec to 15 sec) totally removed the fogging. Those crazy and extremely annoying white spots are there, but only begin to appear at the 2 minute developing mark.

At the end of the day the best time for fuming with bromine was 15 sec (after a first iodine of 15 sec) and the perfect developing time (@85 degrees Celsius) was 1 min. This was TODAY’s answer…tomorrow might be different.

The next test….reducing the mercury temp to 70 degrees and developing longer. So there’s more to do, but I can sleep a bit better tonight regardless 🙂

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[Craig Tuffin]

Thanks for the reply and the link. It seems my ‘search’ skills on cdags leave a lot to be desired.

I’ve now got a few new things to try, one of them a recovered final buffing pad. Damn that Jerry and his incredibly well polished plates. I guess a couple of decades of experience do help though 🙂

[Craig Tuffin]

Thanks Andy…exactly what I’m after!

[Craig Tuffin]

The last time I spoke to Jerry he said that he used a total of 30000ws of light. You can see the multiple heads in the catchlights. He prevented flashburn with clear acrylic mounted in front of the reflectors I think.

I plan on testing the 13000ws that I use for wet plate and hope for the best (I don’t want to have to multiple pop portraits).

Dan Carrillo uses his continuous light set up but he would be better quoting his output and exposure times.

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