Ilford Ortho

[gary in nj]

I have recently set my darkroom up after a three decade hiatus and I'm once again enjoying (with my college age children) the richness and texture of film photography. Everyone has an SRT-200 series and we are sharing a dozen or so lenses. Good family fun.

Anyway, I recently came across some historic postcards (1890-1900) of my town and I have been given the opportunity to make copies of these. Rather then shoot these digitally I wanted to use an authentic process - film.

When I was in junior high school my first exposure (pun) to darkroom work was making full-size negative copies and transferring that negative to paper. I'm going back in time here 40 years, but I seem to remember that this entire process was conducted with safe lights.

What type of film would I use for this. Doing research the closest I've seen is Ilford Ortho Plus. Is this the correct film for this type of image transfer? It looks like it is only red light safe...and all of my lighting is amber. Has anyone used this film in amber lighting.

 

[Ian Grant]

I used a lot of Ilford Ortho for copying, it needs a good deep red safe light, it's quite fast so also easy to fog. I preferred to treat it like any other film and load it in the dark, also process in a daylight tank.

In reality you might just as well use any slow B&W film, your postcards won't reproduce any differently with an Ortho or Panchromatic film. Once you have your lighting and camera set up there's no variables so once you've done a test you can just shoot away.

Ian

 

[darkroommike]

When it was available I used Kodak Professional Copy Film, other used Kodak Commercial (much like the Ilford Ortho). Later when my new boss wanted me to shoot 120 rather than 4x5 I switched to TMax 100. TMX worked really well in this application and I could get good prints up to 16x20.