I have been sitting on this lith paper developer for weeks and finally had the chance to test it out. 

My first time trying lith was during my Black&White II class. I fell in love. It adds color and life to black and white. 

I remember talking to a friend and telling them how much I love color and the difficulties I had with shooting in black and white. I always felt like something was missing. Now after trying lith and sepia toning I realized I was always looking for color. 

Lith printing is truly the best of two worlds, adding color to the grays.  

But it's also a difficult and long process. The first lith print I ever made took over 20 minutes for an image to appear, when it usually takes about 3 minutes. If you are into darkroom printing you know there is a lot of trial and error and variables to control. These past darkroom sessions I found out that lith adds five times more variables and the unpredictability of each print. As much as you try, you never get the same outcome. Every print comes out different. 

Figuring out the timing and repeating the same factors to get a similar print requires so much patience(that I am slowly acquiring). There were several times I wanted to throw away the developer but then an image started appearing just before that happened. It became a waiting game. 

With these sessions I wanted to print and experiment with negatives I will be working with for Vol. III of DirtBag. At first, I was thinking of just doing normal prints but now I’m very tempted to make the whole zine purely lith, which will make the process extremely grueling but might become one of my favorite projects.

Every print took about an hour or more to make, with a lot of trial and error. I constantly had to check my chemicals and see whether they were the issue or if the issue was me underexposing the image. I was never sure about my chemical mix and had to learn why certain chemical reactions happened. I learned the terms “snowballs” and “peppering”, shown below. 

As much as I’m complaining about it, it was so much fun and worth the time and struggle. I recommend everyone to try it out!

I’m really excited to dive more into the process. It's so unpredictable, time consuming, a headache, discouraging, with every print I was ready to give up within 20 minutes, but there is this beauty and draw to it that I can’t shake and want to continue to chase.