Okay. Yes this is a stupid greenhorn question and I am going to the library in a day or two...but, besides sandwiching the fresh photo paper and the paper negative (that I just developed with my homemade pinhole) and shining a flashlight through it, is there anything special I should keep in mind for making a contact print of this sort???
Make sure you put a piece of heavy glass over the neg/paper sandwich to keep them in contact. I would also suggest a light-bulb instead of a flashlight so the exposure will be more even (though a little pin-point flashlight would be great for burning in).
you might consider wetting the paper negative and squeegeeing it off so the emulsion is damp. you'll get a better bond with the print paper that way -
but be careful, if you let it dry on the paper, you'll have a devil of a time separating them ... ( yes, it has happened to me )
If you're not using RC paper for the negative, you can also try waxing the back of the negative; this will make it more translucent and give both shorter exposures and less of the mottling I've seen when trying to contact print paper to paper (30-35 years ago).
If you *are* using RC paper, you might experiment with a technique I've read about, wherein prolonged soaking of the paper and a little work at a corner with a fingernail will allow peeling the emulsion and underlying RC layer off the paper base, giving (in your case) a large format transparent negative that will contact print almost as if it came from a conventional LF camera. I've also read of at least one person making enlargements, using an RC paper negative in the enlarger's negative carrier -- and they didn't have a nuclear powered enlarger, either.
I've only got a Beseler 23...no fission bulbs here...
How much time should I be exposing? I'm using Ilford Multigrade RC...
I exposed the original "negative" for 15 seconds and when I put it in the Dektol, it came up right away and started to quicklu darken. So, I yanked it out and dumped it into the stop bath after about 30 seconds or so. This tells me that my aperture is a bit wide (for a pinhole) and I need to cut my shutter speed a bit.
So, now I have a pretty dark negative that, I guess, should be exposed/burned in pretty heavily, say 30-40 seconds???
Can't tell you how long it would take in the enlarger. Depends on your light source, condenser vs. diffuser, and how fast your enlarging paper is (as well as the density of the paper negative). All it costs to find out is one sheet of printing paper to make a test strip (and if you've printed a bit, you can probably make a good guess for the times to use on the strip by looking at the projected image).
But yes, it certainly seems as if your original exposure might have been, um, more than sufficient... ...and if you got that way in only 15 seconds on paper, you most likely need a *much* smaller pinhole. Is this still the one you poked with a small nail? Try a fine sewing needle (preferably held in a tiny drill chuck or pin vise), and don't insert it all the way. For any reasonable focal length, you want a hole diameter between about .010" and about .020"; yours might be five or ten times that (which would let in 25 to 100 times as much light).
Just drill a hole through it and glue the new one over the hole. BTW, when I've done this, I use black masking tape to attach the pinhole, so I can remove it later if needed. Hard to do down in a hole, of course, but I haven't converted one that needed that (yet).
For that matter, if you can center it well enough, just put your new pinhole right over the old one. It sounds like your old one is plenty big...
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