Film Neg contact printed to neg film = Positive?

In the small town where I live, I've been asked to do a display on old cameras / techniques for our heritage fest, coming up the end of October. So I chose to display some panoramics I've shot with old swing-lens cameras, mostly of local scenes that people would be seeing in new ways. And 3D stereo shots, also local stuff. The local General Store has an old stereoscope viewer I can use, and I've already started to shoot / create stereo views for it. No problem so far, all's good.

But...

I also have a modern stereo viewer for medium-format slides. And I have the mounts. And I've got b/w negatives.

Yes, I know slides would be better, but then I'd have to go into town and drop stuff off and all, make another trip in a week or two to pick them up, etc. It's time and money (gasoline), and while I'm not about to starve in the near future I also would rather not have a fortune tied up in a volunteer effort.

So, could I contact print a b/w negative to a b/w piece of film, and end up with something much like a b/w slide?

Yes it's positive. This is the first step toward duplicating negatives. But getting the contrast right requires some work; you will probably want to contact print onto ilford ortho plus, develop your positive by inspection in a fairly contrasty developer, and perhaps selenium tone the positive to build up a bit more density if you need it. If you do some test strips you'll get it right. Tmax is also a good film for this enterprise but then you can't develop by inspection. O+ and tmax have nice backings so you do get reasonably good, viewable positives with little or no loss in resolution.

There are other ways to do this... but working with o+ is pretty easy since you can work with a red safelight. It's pretty easy to get a washed out positive though, that's what takes some work.

DougGrosjean said:

So, could I contact print a b/w negative to a b/w piece of film, and end up with something much like a b/w slide?

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Yes, but it doesn't work very well, and has high contrast. What you can do instead si shoot B&W film, perhaps in a duping setup and reversal process that film to give a B&W positive.

Craig said:

Yes, but it doesn't work very well, and has high contrast.

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Ahh, but it can work very well and doesn't need to have high contrast.

I think you can quite reasonably manipulate the contrast via your developer and time and temp and a little bit more with Se toning afterwards. I used 1+1 ID11 the last time I tried this and the positives were soso on contrast, not over the top at all. In my case that's what I wanted because I was duping very contrasty IR negs.

I've recently been doing something along those lines. My goal is to make an enlarged negative for cyanotype printing. The intermediate step, making a transparent inter positive, gives essentially the same result as what you required. The cyanotype needs a negative with a steep contrast slope, But since I need to make a negative from the inter positive, and the contrast increases each time another contact print is made, keeping it in check is important.

I have not attempted this with Ilford's Ortho Plus, and quite frankly, I think it's too expensive. The fact that Ilford doesn't list it as a current product in their catalog makes it a non-starter anyway. Freestyle markets some ortho-litho film which is working out reasonably well for this project. See it here: http://www.freestylephoto.biz/sc_prod.php?cat_id=&pid=1214 . At under $20US for 25 sheets of 8x10, it's not too expensive. Photo Warehouse also markets an even less expensive ortho litho film under their own label which I haven't tried yet. See it here: http://www.ultrafineonline.com/ulhicoorlifi.html .

The material from Freestyle is very contrasty stuff, but that can be controlled by developer choice and development time. My original tests were done using bog standard paper developer, Dektol 1+2, for 90 seconds. The image came up very fast, and there is too much contrast in the inter positive for my needs. It looks ok when viewed on a light box, and could be used if it were to be displayed in that manner, but there is room for improvement. The next attempt used the same exposure, but development this time was carried out using HC-110, 1+63. This was much better, though the highlights were a bit washed out and needed more exposure to preserve some detail. I've received suggestions to use Dektol diluted anywhere from 1+9 to 1+20. That may work. I'm planning to try D-76 1+3, XTOL 1+3, and Rodinal at 1+50 and 1+100 as well. In any case, a very dilute and slow working developer is clearly indicated for this application.

&%@!! No freakin' wonder you lot whine at me for not using lith film for my negative enlargements! A box of 25 sheets of 8x10 lith film in the UK is 55-68POUNDS! I can't even get 4x5 lith film as cheap as what freestyle have 8x10 for. Eesh I'm going to look into importing it...

I played with this years ago, used an Illumitran and various B/W films, mostly TMX and TP. The trouble was in getting a good DMAX, sufficient for projection.

I recall that I hit upon the solution of splitting the development (TMY) between D76 1:1 for about 90% of the development time, and dektol for the last bit. It work ok, not really great; I finally decided that the best solution was to make 8x10 glossy prints, dodging and burning as needed, then copying them on 100 ISO chrome. Looks much nicer, projects beautifully, and gives me a set of 8x10 prints, to boot.