Film Washi B Bamboo Photographic Paper 12.7 × 17.8 cm

Overview

Film Washi B is a black-and-white darkroom enlarging paper, not a film, and this is the larger of the two pack sizes. The base is a 110 g/m² bamboo paper handmade in Japan by Awagami Factory, which Film Washi then coats by hand, one sheet after another, in its Brittany workshop; there is no white baryta layer between the emulsion and the paper, so the bamboo core stays visible and becomes part of the print. Film Washi's own description is that it can be processed like any other fibre-base paper and delivers warm tones and nice contrasts. It is a fixed Grade 3 paper — the grade is printed on the pack — so multigrade filtration will not shift its contrast the way it would on a VC paper. Film Washi publishes no datasheet for B: no paper speed, no developer, no development times and no safelight specification, and while the maker files the paper under its orthochromatic materials, a category it describes as insensitive to red light, you should still run your own fog test before committing a session to a given safelight. Handling notes that European dealers reproduce from the pack leaflet, and which do not appear on Film Washi's own site, say the smoother side is the emulsion side, that plain water is preferred to an acid stop bath, that dark patches appearing during processing come from the bamboo fibres and the absence of baryta and disappear once the print is fully dry, and that the print should be taped to glass or a board to dry rather than squeegeed. At 110 g/m² the sheet is far lighter than a conventional fibre-base paper, so expect it to cockle and to be fragile while wet — more so at this size — and hand coating leaves small variations between sheets that Film Washi counts as part of the product rather than a fault. Each pack contains 12 sheets of 12.7 × 17.8 cm (5 × 7 in) plus 12 small strips for test exposures.