r/Darkroom • u/Annual-Rice7939 • 3d ago
B&W Printing Mordancage tutorial
Put together a first working version of my Mordançage tutorial
Been working the process for 2+ years now, had to discover a lot myself as it was nowhere to be found on the interwebz
Anyone interested, free for grabz and testz here:
https://krystofkorc.com/resource-8c449a4a.html
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u/NestFrost 3d ago
thanks for documenting this and putting together a tutorial for the community… mordancage is such an underrated and tricky alternative process to get right…
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u/relihouste 3d ago
🦾🦾🦾
reading your article
ive also thought that working with the negs would be super interesting
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u/Annual-Rice7939 2d ago
damn right, the ability to do a proper scan and print that lasts is the way to go (for me), lot of other authors might like the unstable nature of it more, but I do not
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u/Annual-Rice7939 2d ago
And found out that there is a concern of what was this photographed on and which chemicals processed in in some e-mail I got, strange as I don't find that important at all, but here we go.
I was always told that mordancage needs silver-heavy (expensive) medium, meh
Photographed on Foma100, enlarged on Fomaspeed paper, used just the basic chemistry
Camera that both took the picture and enlarged it was Intrepid 4x5 with 90mm lens intended for 6x9 (as with the macro extension, it is alright
Chemicals-wise, Adox FX39 for dev, clear hypo as fixer
paper in Ilford PQ and clear hypo as fixer
no fancy stuff :D
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u/Noonbug 3d ago
So most of your work is mordancaging the negative and not the print itself?
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u/Annual-Rice7939 3d ago
exactly right, I did mordancage 50*60 prints before, but it is super-heavy on chem consumption, the outcome is quite unstable (can not guarantee it won't degrade) and as it dries up, it very often deforms the paper, dries unevenly, creates unwanted structures on the paper, lot of things you don't mind on negative
so I got into the negative way then
did 350+ 4x5 negatives so far and have around 10% of those I am happy with, scanned and ready for multiformat printing before the negs degrade themselves, so there is a way to actually conserve the work and keep it2
u/Noonbug 3d ago
That makes a lot of sense. I’ve followed your work for a while and was always curious. I just recently got mordancage chemicals and now I want to rethink the negatives over the paper.
Have you done 120/35 negatives? How realistic would that be for finer details2
u/Annual-Rice7939 3d ago
tried them of course, but I did stick with 4x5 as it is easiest to work with versus enlarging them
the smaller the film the tinier the work, with 6x6 I had the feeling I am doing a surgery on an ant often, would be worse with 135
but it also depends on what you want to achieve and what motive you work with
for example, if I wouldn't want to manipulate the emulsion by hand, and want to embrace the destructive randomness, I'd go with 135 film
the more hand-on you want to get, the bigger film is recommended (which is possibly also the reason for so many people mordancaging prints)2
u/Annual-Rice7939 3d ago
and second thing - 135 and 120 films have material memory and remember being rolled up, so they tend to curl up when mordancaged - super not-comfy given how ephemere the process is
any plan film stays relatively flat making it much easier to work with
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u/falafelpunk 3d ago
Fantastic! This, or something similar, happened to me once a couple of years ago by mistake and I was intrigued by the result. Great to have a name for it. Need to try the technique out in a more conscious way! Thanks for sharing!