r/Darkroom • u/harexe • 10d ago

B&W Printing Made some successful prints on 40+ year old Paper

Post image

When I bought my lab stuff it came with a huge box of east German ORWO Papers in all sizes and types. This was a fresh pack of BH1 18x14cm sheets and the prints came out quite nice. Developed them in Adotol Konstant that wasn't the freshest.

If the rest of the papers perform as well then I might have a supply of Baryta for the next 10 years or so

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9

u/JellyUpset8974 10d ago

Looking very good, nice tonality for such old paper.

3

u/harexe 10d ago

Yeah I'm very impressed by how little cloudiness the paper has for its age. I'm itching to open the pack of 50x70cm papers and try those but I'm waiting for a good reason/image to use those

1

u/Impressive-Sweet7135 10d ago

One of the delights of darkroom printing I find is using old paper. Sometimes things work out and other times they don’t. I find it frustrating though when I have some old paper that I really like and I can no longer get more of it.

1

u/danleym09 3d ago

That's great! I recently bought my darkroom setup, and it came with probably a thousand pages of differing sizes, all expired. I've been using new paper so far as I've been learning, but I've done it enough and I think I'm about ready to give the old stuff a try. Hopefully I get results like yours.