Fibre Paper and the Curl
Until this summer every print I had made was on resin-coated paper, which is forgiving: it washes in five minutes, dries in an hour, and lies flat. I had read that fibre-based paper gives a deeper black and a surface that looks like a photograph rather than a photograph of a photograph, and I finally bought a box of twenty-five sheets of 24 by 30 cm to find out. The short answer is that the blacks are better and everything else is harder.
Exposure and development were the easy part. The fibre paper needed about a third of a stop more exposure than the resin-coated at the same grade, and it develops more slowly, taking the full two minutes to reach its final density rather than ninety seconds. The image comes up in the tray like something surfacing from deep water, which is a pleasure I had not expected. Stop bath for thirty seconds, then fixer, and that is where the differences begin.
Fibre paper soaks up chemistry into the paper base, so the fixer has to be washed out of the fibres rather than just off the surface. My first attempt was a thirty-minute wash in the bath with the tap running, which used an unreasonable amount of water. The second attempt used a washing aid, a bath of a sulphite solution for ten minutes after the fix, which cuts the wash time to about twenty minutes. I now wash in a tray with a complete change of water every five minutes, which is less wasteful than a running tap and seems to work.
Then the curl. Resin-coated prints dry flat; fibre prints dry into a tube. I hung the first batch from a line with clips and came back to five tightly curled scrolls that cracked at the edges when I tried to flatten them. The method that finally worked was to blot the print between clean towels, lay it face down on a fibreglass window screen stretched over a frame, and leave it overnight in the warm bathroom. The prints still curl slightly but can be flattened under a stack of books for two days without damage.
Was it worth it? Side by side, the fibre print of the same negative has a black that the resin-coated print does not reach and a surface that catches the light differently. For the handful of negatives I care about, yes. For everything else, the fast paper stays.