The annual ritual of photographing my amaryllis blooms continues. I’ve been recording them – with a few gap years – for over twenty years now.

The original print, shown below, was made by contact printing an 8×10 negative made on Fomapan 100 sheet film and developed in 510-Pyro. The paper used was some very old Slavich Bromoportrait Grade 2 glossy which has an expiry date of 2014. It was bought originally, along with some Slavich Unibrom, for testing as a lith paper, but results for both papers using the lith process were very variable and unpredictable (see https://real-photographs.co.uk/?s=slavich).

It does however produce this very pleasing blue in Kodak T-12 Iron Toner.

Slavich paper appears to be impossible to obtain in the UK now and in fact the only conventional paper still made by this Lithuanian company is the Unibrom variety. I only have a couple of sheets of Bromoportrait left now but several packs of Unibrom (also expired in 2014). I plan on trying Unibrom in blue toner next.