Dots on prints?

[doji1969]

hi@all,

i have got some problems with dots on my first salt prints...

That`s what i did:

soaked the paper in a 2% gelatine solution for 2 minutes
dry
ionized the dry paper with a 2% salt solution
dry
senzitized the paper with 12% silver solution
dry
expose
wash in 1% citric acid (2 times)
fix&wash

for coating the salt and silver a used a pipette to put some drops of the solution on the paper and then i used a glass rod to coat the whole paper. As you can ee on the picture everything went fine, exept that i still can see the initial drops.

any idea how to avoid this? (i do not want to float the paper in the silver solution)

phil

http://quanttrader.at/img020_s.jpg

[earlj]

Phil:

Have you read Mike Ware's instructions on coating with a glass rod: http://www.mikeware.co.uk/mikeware/preparations.html. I use a small plastic syringe to apply a bead of sensitizer in front of the glass rod. The solution is always applied to the paper outside of the image area. I then pull the solution across with the glass rod until it is past the image area on the other side. Then I 'jump' the rod over the line of sensitizer, and pull the rod back to where it started. I like to have enough sensitizer that it takes 5 passes to use it all up - that gives me a very even coat.

Another thing that you can do is to dissolve the salt in your gelatin. Then you don't have to coat the salt solution with the rod - just let the gelatin/salting solution dry and then coat the silver nitrate.

It looks like you are on the right track - keep it up and let us know how it comes out!

[doji1969]

many thanks for the link!
It`s getting better, but even rome was not built in one day...

phil