Contact Sheets: A big mistake

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capitalK

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I shot a roll of B&W which I hoped would be good and sent it off for developing and made the mistake of asking for a contact sheet as well.

Now I am hooked.

I used to make my own back in high school (almost 15 years ago) and forgot how awesome they are.. a great way of looking at a roll.

Now I need to get access to a darkroom again to do my own, they are too expensive to have the lab do on a regular basis.
 
Aha . . . they give a good idea of the relative exposure needed for quickie prints too. Good news is that you don't need a full blown darkroom. A bit of experimentation with a piece of glass over the 10x8 paper, a reading lamp on a shelf above, and a couple of dishes - should come up with consistent and usable results. The usual recommendation is to expose so that you can barely make out the difference between the film base and the plain glass on the positive print. Have fun 🙂
 
I second Martin. Contact sheets are essential for working out consistency in exposure (as well as development -- if you get to that). And if you've got a tabletop set up, doing a contact sheet is faster than scanning all your negatives. Get the right sleeves and you can contact print the set without getting your fingerprints everywhere.
 
Actually, Kentmere (now closely related to Ilford) and possibly Foma do still make POP (or did until last year anyway). Strange but true. There is a slight revival in large format traditional processes apparently.
 
When I worked as a b+w tech (a couple of decades ago now) we had a few customers who would ask for 'contacts' on 20"x16" paper. These were done by putting the negs in the 10x8 negative carrier and then projection-printing, giving a magnification of four times compared to direct contacts. You could quickly see who was making consistent exposures !
 
Thanks, Martin, I didn't know anyone was still making the stuff. When I first started out years ago I had a frame that I would contact print 4x5 negatives on POP paper out in the sun.
 
I've toyed with using a basic digital (canon g5) and a light box to make a digital contact sheet.

Always seems like a better idea in my head than in practice thought. Maybe with a better lightbox.
 
Here is an idea;
Flatbed scanner, put all the negatives on top than put a light table facing down on top of all this.
Click to expand...

I've tried this for LF sheet film, as my scanner's film illumination system only covers medium format. I always end up with black lines running across the image, as if the light source in the portable light table is not at the same phase, AC-wise, as is the scanner. Which makes no sense; they're both running off the same power strip.

Perhaps an incandesent lamp would work better, since the glowing filament will even out any flicker problems; but then you get color temperature problems with color film.

~Joe
 
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Centennial POP is still in production, but there have been some inconsistencies in supply in the past year. It's been made for many years by Kentmere for Chicago Albumen Works (though it's silver gelatin POP, not albumen paper). The last batch had an emulsion problem, which was solved, and in the interim, Kentmere was bought out by Harman (AKA Ilford Photo in the UK, as opposed to Ilford in Switzerland that is owned by Oji Paper), with the assurance that all Kentmere products would continue to be made, and some of the Kentmere equipment was moved to the Harman facility. So it's been slow going, but by all accounts, it should become available again.

In any case--you don't need much to make contact prints. A room that can be made dark, a print frame or a sheet of glass, a lamp, and a few trays will do.
 
This is one of the reasons my last two flatbed scanners had full-size transparency adapters (Last one was a legal-page-sized Agfa; current scanner is a tabloid-size UMAX PowerLook 2100 XL). The ability to scan a full 36-exposure roll (two at a time in the case of the UMAX) has come in handy quite often. Couple this with being able to create "enlarged" contacts up to 13x19", and I wind up not needing to break out the loupe quite as much as I once did.


- Barrett
 
Rogier said:
Here is an idea;
Flatbed scanner, put all the negatives on top than put a light table facing down on top of all this.

I don't have the parts otherwise I would surely give it a try!
Click to expand...

For truly quick and dirty contact sheets you can do this on any scanner that can do transparencies. With one important issue: If you use negative file sheets, the plastic will lift the shadows. YMMV

For quick pre-selection however, the only thing faster is looking at the fresh negatives on the light table! 😛
 
Traditional contact sheet are best for judging your photos. I also, as do many people, used them for record keeping, where you just want the contact sheet to see where a negative is, or what its content was. There is a computer program for putting a lot of scanned images together in a sort of contact print. I experimented with it and wasn't that impressed. It did work, but not like a regular printing based contact print. I will try to find it if anyone is interested.
 
MartinP said:
When I worked as a b+w tech (a couple of decades ago now) we had a few customers who would ask for 'contacts' on 20"x16" paper.
Click to expand...

I do this for rolls of certain subjects- right now I'm working on a project in the woods and making 1620 proofsheets has saved a lot of enlarging of individual negs. A student sold me a box of 1620 RC paper cheap, so till the box is empty they aren't any more expensive than my usual 8.5x11's!

Much easier to evaluate something like this when it's 100x150 instead of 24x36!
softmaple.jpg
 
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