How to Make a Silver Gelatin Darkroom Printing

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Deborah Gray Mitchell with Deborah Gray Mitchell Photography LLC in Miami, Florida. In this clip I'm going to show you how to process a silver gelatin print. Which is simply a black and white print where the layers of, the sliver is embedded in a layer of gelatin on the paper. So once you have exposed your paper and of course, under safe lights and not overhead lights like this. You're going to come in and you're going to put your print, paper into the developing solution. Now this piece of paper has been exposed to daylight, so it's going to turn completely black. But you agitate your print back and forth and you allow generally for about two minutes in the developer. So you time exposure, so that you can do a full two minute development. Once your print is developed in the tray, you can use your tongs, which I think is very important to use tongs. Very carefully grab it from the end, let it drain and put it face up into your stop bath. Now, never use your tong, put your developer tong into your stop bath and then come back, because you will get stains on your prints. You're going to stop your development and you're going to let this go for about a minute, constant agitation. At which point, then you will then gently, again carefully from the corner, pick up your print, and put it into the fixer. Generally, since this is not a ratted fixer, it's about a ten minute fix for a gelatin silver print. And after half of that time, you can turn on the light. So here we are, back to daylight. Now in processing in archival gelatin silver print, one wants to probably use two fixers. You use your old fixer first, then you put it in a fresh fixer, after that you wash it for a while. And then you want to use your Perma Wash, so that you can get an archival wash, because you must wash all of that fixer back off, of your paper for permanents. Once again, this is Deborah Gray Mitchell, thanks for watching."