Lith Printing

I am about to make the Engine Room website live, which includes details of workshops that I am offering.  There are a few processes that I haven’t used for a few years so it would seem to be a good idea to check that I can still get them right.  The first one I have decided to revisit is Lith printing – the last one will definitely be bromoil – I still wake up in a sweat thinking about the hours spent trying to get this process right!

Before tackling lith I thought it would be a good idea to produce some 10x8 contact prints, seeing as these will one of the products of the large format workshop I plan to offer.  There was a time when I stopped taking photographs for pleasure, the dark days of DSLR.  I never wanted to work in a office, and there I was sat at a computer every day, might well have been a spread sheet on the screen for all the fulfillment I got from it.  Digital photographers just don’t realise how satisfying it can be creating images for the vast variety of methods open to traditional photographers.  Who cares about resolution when you can adjust the huge amount of formulas available to make images your own.  It was great to return to the darkroom, my first serious session in over a year!

I decided to make life easier by not mixing my own chemistry but use off the shelf.  One name that I have come to trust over the years is Moersch.  A few years ago I initially received a lot of useful advice, via flickr, from Wolfgang until it struck me that he shared a surname with the name on the bottle of one of my favoured developers, it was no wonder he gave such useful advice!  For this exercise I decided to use Moersch Easy Lith at a basic 1A+1B+40 water.  I will go one in the near future to play with the ratios to get different tonal qualities.  My paper of choice for this was Fomatone MG warm tone.  I over exposed the contacts by four stops, which gave me a dev time of between 8 and 10 minutes, which I was quite happy about.  I have memories of staring at a blank sheet of paper, while constantly agitating, for 30 minutes before the image cam through.

The results aren’t perfect yet, but I am happy with my first day back with lith.