Any paper suggestions/words of advice for 4x5 contact prints?

Recently picked up a press camera, and a friend floated the idea of commissioning a series of black and white photos of local historic buildings/landmarks to make contact prints of for sale in their shop. (aka - art targeting cruise ship/tourist crowds that can have things like "Handmade" and "Local" stuck on the label, and any other fun suitable buzz words.)

So far I've always sent out for printing services, and haven't taken the dive into doing my own till now, but I have been looking over paper prices of what is readily in stock and easy to order, and my various options for printing, and I'm feeling kind of stuck debating what route to take.
- Centring/weighed on a larger sheet, such as a 5x7 and clearly masking the edges before contact printing,
- Going with a 4x6 paper stock, and trimming down. (Kind of liking the idea of having a load of scrap ends for testing with)
- Something else entirely?

Assuming I go ahead with the project, then I'm likely going for an RC paper for general user-friendliness, and run them in a few batches during the tourist season based on how popular things get.

Planning on shooting Delta 100 and HP5 for film, ID-11 developer. Still not completely sure what paper developer to go with.

Any useful thoughts, suggestions, or pitfalls to watch out for when getting started?

hi luckless

you might hear a handful of different advisments here, you might also go to the large format.info page and poke around there, and go to michaelandpaula.com and read
about what michael smith and paula chamlee have to say about contact printing as well. one of the easiest papers to work with is a silver chloride paper like lodima or azo or lupex.
lupex is made by adox, azo isn't made anymore and lodima is made by michael and paula. they are all made for contact printing, and have a really long shelf life so if you buy some "outdated stock" i wouldn't
worry too much about it. you will have to get used to exposing/processing your film to tune it to these papers though, they take a denser negative, and you will need to find a 300R watt light bulb too, but
once you get those few things taken care of, you will have no problem at all making great prints. some suggest you HAVE to use amidol developer, but i never have, i usually use either dektol or ansco 130.
you might also consider toning in selenium ( i never have ) because sometimes the non-amidol developers give a color cast to the prints.
that all said, you can also use any paper you want to use with a regular enlarger light source, a lot less of a hassle, nothing extra to buy &c, and you will just have to get good at test strips, burning and dodging.
my main advice is to make sure your glass that you will have on top of your negative is clean. spotting &c can be a real pain in the neck. and once you get a system down make sure you follow it to a T
its a lot easier to work with film that is all the same and doesn't require additional filtration &c than 20 differnt negatives developed 20 differnt ways and will require hours of mapping and xperimenting to get a good print.
last bit of advice, keep your costs down so you can make a profit

have fun!

john

If you want the convenience of variable contrast and rc paper and you don't want to invest in setting up an enlarger or much of a darkroom, you can expose the prints with a very dim bulb like a 2 watt led or even a night light that uses the christmas bulb type bulbs. For varying the contrast you could buy a 6 inch set of Ilford contrast filters from B&H photo on line store. You could invest in a spring back print frame or just get an 8x10 piece of quarter inch plate glass and lay it on top of the negative on top of the paper and you could lay the contrast filter on top of that. You would need some way to suspend the light source above the print but perhaps you could just hang the bulb in a small fixture.

Still playing with the "how" on the plan for the printing process itself. An actual wet darkroom setup has a vague chance of being ready in time, but if not, then the frame of a light utility shelving unit, a bolt of black-out drapery cloth, and a decent sized safelight filter as a viewport might get set up on the kitchen table as a mini-daylight lab. (Whether or not the sleeves off a changing bag get sacrificed may depend on how annoying the black-out cloth is to attach to itself without pinholes.)

Should be easy enough to play around with a few different light setups for it before starting in on a print run.

i hate to throw another thing in the "mix" but if you are able to make the negatives (daylight film processing)
you might think about alternative process prints as well as or instead of silver prints.
you an buy "sun print paper" from "sunprints.org" which is pre-coated packets of classic cyanotype paper.
or you can buy ( hopefully ) the 2 chemicals to make classic cyanotypes, and some archival paper, and a paint brush
or coating rod and in dim room light you can coat paper, and in daylight, without a silver print making
darkroom type place you can make contact prints and wash them ( it is just iron compounds that wash out ).
if you don't like blue, you can read about bleaching back with a tiny bit of washing soda and water and tea
toning, so your photographic footprint will be light, and you won't need a full out lab. cyanotypes are about
as archival as archival gets if done right, and if toned with black tea can have the same "look" if that is what
you are after, as a toned silver print. making cyanotypes is a great alternative process, lots of fun, easy to
make. bosiick and sullivan and the photographers forumulary both sell pre measured "just add water" kits
that have enough chemicals to make 500 8x10s ... and it costs very little compared to making silver prints,
so cheap its almost free

A timer is needed for the lamp that exposes the paper, there are plenty on ebay, search for enlarger timer, the simple "electric clock" type is suitable, they can be found for a few dollars. Here are some examples on ebay.com 292047633125 and 232264795790

When contact printing whole plate negs I made an 8x10 mask from thin black card that fitted exactly over the 6.5x8.5 neg and gave a white border in the finished print, the edges of the image included a black border where the clear film holder rebate allowed light through.

I can recommend Ilford VC MG RC pearl paper and developer. A 4x5 image centered on an 8x10 sheet will pop straight into an easily available 8x10 frame and look great.

Adding more ideas to the mix is always fun. Doesn't always make it easier make a final pick, but I don't need to make a decision on printing too soon so no great rush there. (Still waiting for my film order to get here anyway. The only 4x5 I have on hand is 4 sheets of random mystery film that showed up in used holders. Assuming they're ruined, but who knows?)

Hadn't really thought about cyanotypes for this project. Thanks for the reminder. I might add the stuff for them to the next shopping list and see how they go. The exposure times on them might make them a little difficult to do in larger numbers. They sound like a rather slow process compared to a contact print on RC paper and premade mask layers, but I guess if they proved popular and I made both, then I could probably swing a nice markup on the sun prints.


Oddly enough timers aren't something I'm in short supply of. They have been the one bit of random camera equipment that people have dropped off to me because I'm "The camera guy" in my social circle.

There is always little vintage contact printers on Ebay. They were designed for slow contact paper. You would need find a small 7 watt bulb. You simply lay your negative emulsion side up on the printer glass then lay your paper emulsion side down on the negative and close the platen. If you would get a nice little repeating electronic timer for an enlarger. You would be set. Most of these little printers would go up to 5x7, the one I have is a Kodak all metal contact printer it has masking blades to adjust to negative size.
A nice timer that you can accurately time to 1/10 of a second is almost a must if you want to use affordable RC paper.
You might consider sepia toning some.
If your plan is to make money make inexpensive, quality, RC prints and set up a good record of your exposure times on each negative so you can make more.
This is how almost all snap shots were printed before the boom in 35mm in the 50's.
You can still buy precut 4x5 paper but in comes in huge quantities. Centering it on a 5 x 7 paper might be just the ticket.
Mike

Luckless said:

The exposure times on them might make them a little difficult to do in larger numbers. They sound like a rather slow process compared to a contact print on RC paper

Click to expand...

maybe, but if you just leave them out in the sun you can do other stuff and not be tied into the process. ( its one of those things that can be done "in the background". ) i've made sun prints and cyanotypes through a window too
so that might also be an option, and if there is SNOW on the ground the reflected UV speeds up exposure time ( or it has with me, or that was suggested to be the reason my exposures were faster through PAPER negatives ).
the sunprint site has aproximate exposure times for film negatives, they are in berkley california, and they told me that their mixture ( emulsion ) might be a little slower than stuff you might coat yourself.
sounds like a fun project!

Many good suggestions here. I print on Lodima and Adox Lupex using a bare bulb for exposure. One point I'd make is bulb choice should you decide to go this route for your contact printing; I tried several different (styles) and wattage of incandescent bulb, and they all worked, but I found that an LED bulb worked best...for me. I didn't like the way the flood style bulbs ramped up in intensity to full on, and then ramped back down (sort of a fade out of the light) to turn off. I had some issues printing very bright high values right on the edge of the curve due to the aforementioned characteristic of an incandescent bulb. The LED is instant on/off.

Good luck with your foray into contact printing! It's very satisfying and produces beautiful prints!