The silvery highlights in this photograph from Mono Lake made me fall in love with this print from 1980. In the darkroom, a two-bath paper developer process allowed softer and extended highlight development followed by a short emersion in a strong developer to hit the more exposed (darker) areas of the print. This technique was inspired by my friend Ted Orland who used it on a wonderful print, as I recall, of an old gas station pump.
The darkroom print development for this print, as best I can recall, was Kodak Selector Soft as the first developer, in the tray for quite a long time. It might have even been as long as 9 minutes. The idea was to fully develop the highlight and mid-tone values, then use Kodak Dektol as a second more powerful developer (30 seconds to a minute or two) to take the print’s dark values, now saturated with developer, but still only dark gray from the Selectol-Soft, and let the Dektol take the dark values to a rich black. The paper I used was Agfa Brovira toned briefly in Selenium toner after development.
I was so pleased with the results that I made 5 identical prints and froze the paper to come back and do more. I was never able to repeat the effect.
I made this image while gathering work for my group show “At Mono Lake.”
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