Weird Film Adventures

Alright, first a little back story in case you haven’t been following along (or if I haven’t been making sufficiently detailed updates):

Since I would like to explore the world of carbon printing—and other alternative processes of printing—I need negatives that are going to be the size of the final print.  Virtually all alternative processes require UV light and contact printing.  There are traditionally three ways to do this:

1. Shoot on 8×10 or ultra large format film.  Talk to Mat Marrash if you’d like to learn more, but have your bank statements handy.  It ain’t cheap.
    
2. Scan your film (or if you shoot digital, open up your file) and make an inkjet print to transparency material.
    
3. Enlarge to a 8×10 or larger piece of film (which will produce a positive transparency), then contact print that to make a negative.

What most people nowadays seem to be doing is number 2—printing on a professional printer and making “digital negatives.”  There are a few reasons why this is a poor option for me.  First off, you really need to have a pro printer, whereas I have an all-in-one HP.  Apparently Epson is the way to go for anything serious, because Epson inks are the best for blocking UV light. (Remember that UV light is the only light we’re interested in for the purposes of alternative processes.)  Furthermore, they have like seven or eight different inks, and you can calibrate your system to find an ink combination that will give you just the right contrast and tonal scale.

I could just ignore all this and try making digital negatives with my HP printer, but even then, the price of ink is insane.  And I’ve never been good at printing out images to my printer – something always seems to go wrong and I waste far more material getting a print of a digital image using my own printer than if I were to use a service such as Mpix.  Unfortunately, I haven’t found a source for “farming out” my digital negatives to some other 3rd party in the same way, and I doubt I will unless alternative process printing takes off in a huge way.  Even then, there’s probably a lot of time I’m going to have to spend in Photoshop (ugh) to prepare a scan for uploading and printing.

Needless to say, I’m not going to spend the bucks on a professional Epson printer just so I can make digital negatives.  It’s not like I’d use it for traditional inkjet prints.  I hate spending time in Photoshop and Lightroom anyway, so I just do the bare minimum in those programs to make something presentable to Mpix whenever I need a print of my color photos.

For the longest time, I was convinced that option 3—enlarging to a piece of film—was not an option.  First off, there are problems with “traditional” 8×10 films.  They’re too sensitive, and they’re very expensive.  For example, some 8×10 Ilford film works out to be $4.40 per sheet.  There used to be some techniques that you could do with what was known as “Ortho Lith” film, which was used for lithography processes.  Sadly, though, it’s no longer produced, and even Freestyle, who was the last vendor to carry it, has run out of material.

But as luck would have it, I stumbled on to what could be a miracle – Ultrafine Continuous-tone Duplicating Film.  From the description, it seems that this is what I need…  ”Can be used for copying continuous-tone B&W pictures.”  ”Permits the making of either same-sized duplicates, or enlarged negatives.” “Most widely used in platinium, palladium, gelatine and gum bichromate printing, and print-out paper applications.” Score!  And even in a low-quantity package, it works out to $0.79 per sheet. Relatively speaking, that’s an amazing value.

So last night, I tried my first tests of the film.  I treated it like a paper, complete with the last of my PQ Universal developer.  It was advertised as being ISO 4, which sounded close to what people use for rating paper in pinhole cameras, so I figured that it should have a rating similar to all these papers I’ve been messing around with.  I tried developing a test strip of an enlarged “blank” negative with 3-second exposure increments.  A pretty basic paper test to determine the minimum time to reproduce maximum black.  To my surprise, the film turned out completely black.  No steps or different tones at all.  I then tried 1-second steps, figuring that I had somehow overexposed everything.  Again, black!

This is when I started to worry.  I cut two small pieces of the film, then I threw one straight into the fixer and the other one straight into the developer.  The results were strange… The fixed-out piece was orange, of all things.  The developed-and-fixed piece was a somewhat-transparent black, just like all the test strips.  Confused by the colors, I took out another scrap piece and just looked at it in the room light.  The emulsion was orange, like a C-41 film, and the back was colored dark.

I was utterly confused, and was about to call it quits for the rest of the night.  But then I realized that I had a nice, fully exposed piece of film in my hands, and I hadn’t tried developing it yet.  So, I ran it through the developer, stop and fixer.

It came out blue. Fairly transparent, actually, when compared to my previous “black” test strips. Very strange, since I was expecting something even blacker.  Clearly, though, something was up, and I needed to find out what.  I finally decided to throw a negative in the carrier and just enlarge it with my trusty Kodak Projection Print Scale.  You never can tell, maybe I’d get an image yet.  Lo and behold, when I exposed for 60 seconds at f/8, I could actually see an image!  It was faint, though, so I decided to go all out, yank out my contrast filter to bump up the light and expose for the same time at f/4.  The result was a lot better, because I was getting a great blue-and-black negative.

Wait a minute, negative?  Did my eyes deceive me?  Sure enough, I was getting a negative image, despite projecting a negative onto the easel.  Whatever bizarre process this was, I was getting a positive result.  If this actually works, then that would mean I wouldn’t need to make an intermediate positive for making my enlarged negative.  That means it would take half as much film as I originally thought to make my negatives for alternative processes!

Sadly, it was getting late, so I was unable to experiment further, instead choosing to bottle up my excitement and save it for the next session in the darkroom.  But, needless to say, I’m getting pretty optimistic about producing large negatives for contact printing.  Eat it, Epson!

2011/12/02 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: alternative process, darkroom, printing, ultrafine | 1 Comment »