One of the pleasures/challenges of printing with analog photography used to be deciding on what paper to use. Agfa, Ilford and Kodak all produced papers designed specifically to produce images ranging from neutral to warm tones – in the warmest whites became a rich cream. A variety of tones could also be achieved by chemically toning neutral prints.
Mikael Siirila uses tea to tone prints – ‘the cream-toned prints contrasting with the cool detachment of his world view’ (‘Anyone for Tea’, Black+White Photography, No. 278).
I thought I’d experiment with this. I made brew of two PG Tips tea bags in 500ml of water, let it cool to room temperature and attempted to tone commercial silver prints from Harman. Using the tea neat, I experimented with variations on pre-soak and immersion times and degree of agitation. A problem that quickly emerged was patchy toning due to finger marks on the prints. The process that eventually seemed to produce an acceptable effect was: immersion of the prints in tepid water; washing gently with washing up liquid; rinsing for one minute; immersion in the tea bath for two minutes with continuous agitation; and washing in cold running water for two minutes. The two pictures below show the subject with and without toning.
Toning can be achieved digitally with a lot less trouble, of course. There is the same picture with the Lightroom cream tone preset applied.
Great to see you getting your hands wet again Brian! Nice result.
Thanks, Roy, I enjoyed it, though I’m not sure the result was worth the effort. Still, I may look at other ways of playing on the wet side of photography again.