Moving to Montana

 On the flight from Seattle I could see all these lovely 'crop circles'. We flew to Missoula and then drove a further 80 miles to our home for the next week...

 We arrived on a Sunday afternoon and had a few hours to ourselves (the last for the week)- so I went for a wander.
Photographers Formulary is owned by Bud and Lynn. Bud also has a side business in boulders.

 This is our building which housed 3 big darkrooms as well as our dining area and lecture area.
It was a warm and sunny week but we felt little of it as we were indoors mostly working day and night.

 This must have been toning time because it can be done under normal daylight.

Our group - which included Jane (technical assistant) and Tim Rudman and his wife Ingrid.
Workshops usually have 10 people but we ended up with only 7 as a couple cancelled due to problems from Hurricane Irene. It was to our benefit mostly as we got more time for input from Tim.
At the end of the week we displayed our best images for all the staff to view.

 There was a lot of talk about bears. Firstly they said there weren't any about then slowly came the stories of various incidents. On our last day I bought a copy of the Missoula paper - the front page story about a bear right in town.

So - what are Lith prints? One starts with  a black and white negative and develops it in a slightly different developer, sometimes 2 developers. The images are often anything but black and white - taking on various hues according to a multitude of variables. We also toned some - gold toner lead to a blue-ish effect and selenium came out more brown. Best was often a combination of both with dark browns and light blues. Often the images seemed more 3D due to the splits of colours.

 Sometimes the prints had a lovely creamy look, other times it was a less pleasing salmon - but that could then be changed in the toning process.

 The images above - top left is selenium toned, bottam left is gold toned and the one on the right is a combination.

 This image worked well with the process - the background and foreground seeming quite separate. The two below were a result of some random playing on the  last night when we thought one of the solutions had become contaminated - I really like them both. They seem very antique.

I hadn't been too sure what I would learn from the workshop or how useful it would be but actually I learnt lots and it will be very useful for a lot of my images that have been hard to print more conventionally. Now I just hoave to figure out how to get some of the developer - it is too toxic to ship - but I do have recipes for various possibilities.