Tandemfahren
Hello to all the pros and experienced lab technicians!
As I’m new here: my name is Frank, I’m a boat builder on Lake STA in real life, and I’ve been dabbling in black and white photography for a few years now.
But so far, I’m really just an amateur with a playful streak...
My favourite project is black and white projection slides. Reversing the photographic material has, in my humble opinion, a few drawbacks that I’d like to get rid of:
- limited choice of materials
- practically every shot requires a bracketed exposure series
- no contrast control and no fanning possible
So I’ve made some nice prints from a few nice negatives, approx. 17x25cm, and made paper negatives from these, as described by Ilford.
Looks good so far! I’ve also checked the grey-scale reproduction using a grey scale. And then comes the crux:
How do I make the slide now? To be clear: I want to photograph the paper negative with the camera; that will become a slide in the negative process.
Well, it SHOULD become one, ha ha.
I immediately ruled out the utterly trivial blunders (blunders? blunders??) like putting ordinary photographic film in negative developer (i.e. I only did one on a roll of film I just happened to have in my camera, with the expected result)
At the moment I’m trying Maco Ort 25 in diluted Dokumol; that does produce grey tones now, but the maximum blackness is more of a sort of
“medium brown”.
Does anyone know what trick I need? I don’t mean getting Mr Wehner to do it for me, you know, I want to cook up my own fun!
One more thing: yes, I’ve already thought about cutting the positive and doing a reverse development. But one thing at a time...
Thanks for any “relevant tips” and constructive criticism!
Frank
P.S. Where can I find the article “Kehret um” that everyone except me seems to know about? I’m just a bit of a computer novice, after all.
bernhardmangelsgmxde
Why don’t you just use standard colour transparency and use it to reproduce the standard black-and-white images? If the lighting is right, there shouldn’t be too much of a colour cast.
(That’s my approach to incorporating black-and-white images into slide series, though so far with only modest success; 13x18 baryta prints that didn’t turn out quite flat (another issue...) don’t look all that great at 130 x 200 cm...)
Or do you want to do everything yourself?
Tandemfahren
Yes, thank you, I’ve already tried that, but with limited success.
Apart from a craftsman’s desire to do everything himself (yes, yes—chopping wood, chewing it up, flattening it, hunting wild cattle, gelatine…), the problem with the standardised E6 process is the same as with reversing the film: no contrast control is possible.
In other words, first I labour away, sweating buckets, to get the best possible print, and then the black on the slide isn’t black again.
Apparently there are projectors these days that do amazing things in the realm of not projecting... A projected image thrives on contrast, right? That’s what I’ve learnt from my half-baked experiments!
What I have in mind is some brilliant input from a chemistry whizz (I actually got top marks in chemistry at school 25 years ago – there you go again: non scholae sed scholae discimus ǂrch).
The film gives up so much black so easily if you just expose it properly and develop it – but in the image it doesn’t look so rosy, or rather, too rosy.
Maybe I’m on the wrong track and taking photos of prints is much better – but I just really want to be creative for a change.
And I’m a bit daunted by the whole reverse development process, too.
Regards
Frank Bleyer
Nordlicht
Hi Frank,
Have you considered printing the original film negatives directly onto film?
I’ve had good results with Kodak Eastman Print Release Film. It’s an orthochromatic cinema film that’s processed like black-and-white photographic paper; fanning the film might be a bit tricky, but the contrast can be fine-tuned using exposure time and developer.
This saves you having to transfer them to paper, and if you want to do this on a larger scale, it’s worth buying a 100-foot roll.
That would be my suggestion, provided the aim isn’t to document the prints or produce image sections.
Christoph
