Silver gelatin prints from the east coast
Selworth is one person and one darkroom on the East Riding coast. Six series are open at the moment; two have been open for four years. Everything here was made on a 4×5 view camera, developed by hand, and printed on fibre-base paper in the room the prints are posted from.
Every print is toned in selenium at 1:20 for six minutes. Selenium converts metallic silver, and it converts what is there, so a print takes colour in its shadows, keeps the paper in its highlights, and does not change its tones. That is the only treatment applied to anything on this site, and the figure under each photograph is the mean chroma measured in the file you are looking at.
The work
What the toner does
Top row: silver selenide, C* = 16 × (1 − L* ÷ 80), hue 322°. Bottom row: the same negative, out of the wash and never in the toner. Figures are the chroma the law asks for at that density.
The bottom row is a reference print: the same negative, the same paper, pulled from the wash and never put in the toner. It is kept because it is the only way to say what the toner did, and it is on the site, next to its toned twin, on the darkroom page.
Prints
Every photograph here is available as a print, made to order in three sizes on fibre-base paper, toned the same way, signed on the reverse and posted flat. Two to three weeks, because a fibre print has to be washed for an hour and dried flat for a day.
Order a printNotes
- Four winters on one shingle bank
Ninety-six sheets of film of the same two hundred metres of stone. What comes out of photographing one place for long enough to see it move, and why the tripod goes back in the same three holes.
- Why every print goes in the toner
Selenium is usually sold as an archival step. It is that, but the reason every print here goes through it is that it separates the shadows, and the only way to prove it is to keep one print out.