Whopper prints

xtolsniffer · Feb 26, 2016

Hi ,
I just thought I'd share a recent experience with you. Where I work, there was a competition to have photographs printed up and put on the wall of a newly decorated canteen. I sent in a few scans from some old 35mm slides (Velvia taken on a tripod mounted Olympus OM-1 with an old Tamron 28mm AD2 lens) and they got selected. The final prints are cropped from the middle section of the slides, so 35 mm across and were printed up onto canvas boards that are 4 m long which I think is x115 enlargement. Up close they are of course just mush, but stand back a few meters and they look great. Amazing what you can get out of a 35mm slide...

Rick A · Feb 26, 2016

Well, they were designed to be projected onto a large screen and viewed from a distance.

ic-racer · Feb 26, 2016

Yes, digital beats analog with respect to that because the digital process avoids diffraction during the projection printing process of small film. This is why they invented large format film

Gerald C Koch · Feb 26, 2016

Digital has its own unique set of aberrations.

gone · Feb 26, 2016

Congratulations. Now you have plenty of reasons to go down there for a drink or something to eat. I'm impressed that just crops gave that sort of enlargement, and yes, concerning digital, if I had my choice to go w/ that or slide film I'd go w/ film any day. I haven't found much use for digital at all, other than taking pics of film equipment to sell. The stuff just looks wrong.

Years ago I saw a good show of Warhol's Factory days. Someone had taken pics of the going ons w/ 35mm B&W film and blown it up about half the size you mentioned, and from normal viewing distances they looked wonderful. Closer, you had lots of big grain, just like you'd want. Who walks up to a large blow up and sticks their nose in it anyway? Andy's half frame pics in colour had been enlarged modestly, and I would have thought they were 35m except for the format.

RalphLambrecht · Feb 26, 2016

xtolsniffer said:
Hi ,
I just thought I'd share a recent experience with you. Where I work, there was a competition to have photographs printed up and put on the wall of a newly decorated canteen. I sent in a few scans from some old 35mm slides (Velvia taken on a tripod mounted Olympus OM-1 with an old Tamron 28mm AD2 lens) and they got selected. The final prints are cropped from the middle section of the slides, so 35 mm across and were printed up onto canvas boards that are 4 m long which I think is x115 enlargement. Up close they are of course just mush, but stand back a few meters and they look great. Amazing what you can get out of a 35mm slide...

They usually say:if you can't make it good,make it big but you've apparently achieved both.congrats

Jim Jones · Feb 26, 2016

At least one of the Kodak Colorama 18x60 foot transparencies exhibited at New York's Grand Central Station was captured on 35mm

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/coloramas/colorama.html
.

DREW WILEY · Feb 26, 2016

Not terribly long ago I talked to one of the people who printed the Colorama murals. Most of them were 35mm as I recall. But they were obviously
intended for viewing at considerable distance. The most influential photograph in history was mass-produced billboard size from a poorly focused 35mm shot. I'm referring to the Marlboro Man. It's probably killed more people than most wars; that's why I call it influential. The outdoor ad agency
down the street from here could take a cell phone shot and put it on a digital billboard sixty feet wide. Nobody would notice because they'd be looking at it from a quarter mile away driving down the freeway. So everything is relative. But people do put their noses right up to my own prints because
the detail is there. These are obviously printed from large format film. When I shoot 35mm I take a different strategy completely, and don't try to
make it into something it is not. In such cases I might actually prefer some grain or artifacts, more the colloquial approach, so to speak. It's all fun.

Cropline · Feb 26, 2016

DREW WILEY said:
......... But people do put their noses right up to my own prints..........

I've heard of people doing this but was surprised to see it myself for the first time. I had a 16x20 photo-from 35mm- I asked a fellow 'tog to look at and see if he could notice grain. Nose to paper. Paper to forehead. I was amazed. They couldn't spot it but it was minimally there.

pbromaghin · Feb 26, 2016

Does anybody know if the coloramas still exist? They would make a way cool museum show!

DREW WILEY · Feb 26, 2016

Long gone. They were dye transfer prints and eventually faded after about twenty years on display. Pretty damn good for the conditions, though the
dirty little secret is that Kodak apparently didn't use Kodak's own dyes!

Prof_Pixel · Feb 26, 2016

DREW WILEY said:
Not terribly long ago I talked to one of the people who printed the Colorama murals. Most of them were 35mm as I recall. But they were obviously
intended for viewing at considerable distance. The most influential photograph in history was mass-produced billboard size from a poorly focused 35mm shot. I'm referring to the Marlboro Man. It's probably killed more people than most wars; that's why I call it influential. The outdoor ad agency
down the street from here could take a cell phone shot and put it on a digital billboard sixty feet wide. Nobody would notice because they'd be looking at it from a quarter mile away driving down the freeway. So everything is relative. But people do put their noses right up to my own prints because
the detail is there. These are obviously printed from large format film. When I shoot 35mm I take a different strategy completely, and don't try to
make it into something it is not. In such cases I might actually prefer some grain or artifacts, more the colloquial approach, so to speak. It's all fun.

The Coloramas and Kodaramas were printed from large format internegatives (IIRC about 8" wide). I produced about half a dozen negatives digitally while doing development work on the Kodak Premier System. Several involved digital manipulation (which I won't discuss here) but two (one Colorana and one Kodarama) jobs involved just producing a negative that produced a final display transparency that looked like the original images (the Kodarama from 120 Kodacolor VR 400 and a Colorama from 35mm Kodachrome 200). The normal internegative process lost the 'look and feel' of the original images.

Prof_Pixel · Feb 26, 2016

pbromaghin said:
Does anybody know if the coloramas still exist? They would make a way cool museum show!

Kodak donated the collection to the George Eastman Museum and they have a traveling exhibit. See https://eastman.org/colorama for more information.

DREW WILEY · Feb 26, 2016

Read the fine print. Probably no original dye transfer prints involved. They call them chromogenic; in other words, no doubt scanned from the original
separation negatives and laser printed. They'll not doubt be interesting, but nowhere near as compelling as unfaded DT prints, at least in terms of color per se, probably not in the sharpness category.

Prof_Pixel · Feb 26, 2016

DREW WILEY said:
Read the fine print. Probably no original dye transfer prints involved. They call them chromogenic; in other words, no doubt scanned from the original
separation negatives and laser printed. They'll not doubt be interesting, but nowhere near as compelling as unfaded DT prints, at least in terms of color per se, probably not in the sharpness category.

The only dye transfer print I ever saw in regards to the Colorama was used in a football themed one from October 1950. The early ones were multi-image. This Colorama had a football 'action shot' in the center that originated as dye transfer, while the images on either side were from early color negative film. I know this because I was asked to restore/create a new version of the complete Colorama that could be made into a small color print that could be given to the Nation Football League Headquarters. (The color negatives had badly faded, but I was able to produce acceptable prints.)

There was no dye transfer technology involved in any of the others that I worked with.

The George Eastman traveling exhibit was made from the original source material from Kodak.

DREW WILEY · Feb 29, 2016

There was apparently a sequence of Colorama images, with the selection replaced over time. It would be inconceivable that any early ones could
have been chromogenic prints. For one thing, the quality of reproduction was so-so; but more important, they would have faded much too quickly.
Some of the originals were undoubtedly Kodachromes. But dye transfer prints could certainly be made from color negs back then too, not just via
pan masking film but by a double neg separation technique. As I was told in detail, at one point they all were dye transfers. But it is certainly interesting that you were able to recover useful information from old color negs and fill in another leg of this story, or at least, of its revival. It
was a fascinating era of showing off Kodak's muscle during its heyday.

removed account4 · Feb 29, 2016

xtolsniffer said:
Hi ,
I just thought I'd share a recent experience with you. Where I work, there was a competition to have photographs printed up and put on the wall of a newly decorated canteen. I sent in a few scans from some old 35mm slides (Velvia taken on a tripod mounted Olympus OM-1 with an old Tamron 28mm AD2 lens) and they got selected. The final prints are cropped from the middle section of the slides, so 35 mm across and were printed up onto canvas boards that are 4 m long which I think is x115 enlargement. Up close they are of course just mush, but stand back a few meters and they look great. Amazing what you can get out of a 35mm slide...

hi xtolsniffer
yeah its pretty amazing what they can do these days, isn't it ?
i have had some sales of really big things they look fantastic
( from afar and upclose ) ... there aren't many places that print
"ultra wide" format, and it isn't cheap ! ..

Whopper prints

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