Paper negative
Every once in a while I have this dream where I discover an extra room in my house that I didn’t know existed before. It’s such a great feeling of expansion and promise. That’s how I felt when I heard recently you can expose photographs straight onto photographic paper. It’s a well known thing, but I was delightfully intrigued. I had to try it. My 4x5 camera is a natural fit for the task, since I can cut an 8x10 sheet of photographic paper into four sheets (but having to shave about a millimeter off of the long side so the sheet fits the film holder). When the paper is exposed, it creates a negative image, which after development, you scan and invert.
One of the challenges I soon discovered is that without testing, it’s hard to know what the effective ISO is for the paper. The ISO is very low, somewhere in the single digits from what the AI Internet tells me. With such a low ISO, the exposure is generally many seconds long. I could do something of a test strip by pulling the dark slide out by thirds evenly across my presumed exposure time, then develop it to figure out the optimum time, but I have limited access to a darkroom at this point, so I aimed for the middle and used in the range of 3 to 6 for my ISOs, depending on how I was feeling at the moment.
My results were mixed. In some cases, the images are clearly overexposed, but in other cases, they turned out well. From my less-than-scientific and incomplete process, it seems that an ISO of 4 was my sweet spot. I’ll start from there going forward and see how it might change depending on the brand/type of paper I use. I could also expirement with development times. I may even do a test strip.
The images can have a lot of contrast, but they have a soft focus feel as well. I do like that look, but it’s my understanding you can pre-flash the paper to reduce the contrast. It’s something I’ll have to learn to do. Another thing I heard you can do is create a contact print from the paper negative. I’ll add that to my list of things to try.
Every once in a while I have this dream where I discover an extra room in my house that I didn’t know existed before. It’s such a great feeling of expansion and promise. That’s how I felt when I heard recently you can expose photographs straight onto photographic paper. It’s a well known thing, but I was delightfully intrigued. I had to try it. My 4x5 camera is a natural fit for the task, since I can cut an 8x10 sheet of photographic paper into four sheets (but having to shave about a millimeter off of the long side so the sheet fits the film holder). When the paper is exposed, it creates a negative image, which after development, you scan and invert.
One of the challenges I soon discovered is that without testing, it’s hard to know what the effective ISO is for the paper. The ISO is very low, somewhere in the single digits from what the AI Internet tells me. With such a low ISO, the exposure is generally many seconds long. I could do something of a test strip by pulling the dark slide out by thirds evenly across my presumed exposure time, then develop it to figure out the optimum time, but I have limited access to a darkroom at this point, so I aimed for the middle and used in the range of 3 to 6 for my ISOs, depending on how I was feeling at the moment.
My results were mixed. In some cases, the images are clearly overexposed, but in other cases, they turned out well. From my less-than-scientific and incomplete process, it seems that an ISO of 4 was my sweet spot. I’ll start from there going forward and see how it might change depending on the brand/type of paper I use. I could also expirement with development times. I may even do a test strip.
The images can have a lot of contrast, but they have a soft focus feel as well. I do like that look, but it’s my understanding you can pre-flash the paper to reduce the contrast. It’s something I’ll have to learn to do. Another thing I heard you can do is create a contact print from the paper negative. I’ll add that to my list of things to try.
