Following
Wolfgang Moersch on Flicker he has some great lith prints of fall leaves. I believe from his comments he placed them in the enlarger and printed them directly. These are truly nice prints and show what an artist he is. I decided to give it try (without Lith as it takes so much longer). I think Wolfgang has a 4x5 enlarger as he has some large tree leaves in his print set. I can only go to 6x6 so I must go for smaller leaves. I picked a random leaf that might be interesting. I put it in the film holder ...
Then the usual test strips...
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| Test Strip at f8 #00 Filter |
The first at f8 was overexposed. So I moved to f16.
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| Test Strip at f16 #00 Filter |
the exposure at 64 seconds seemed best. So I opened it up to f11 and exposed at 32".
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| Leaf Print f11 #00 32 sec |
Lots of detail and with the lowest contrast filter. (Ilford MGIV Deluxe RC Pearl).
So I thought that this looks like a negative image and I would like to get a positive.I used the above print as a paper inter-negative (See my posting on this
here.) I placed a piece of unexposed test strip paper face up in the printing frame, placed the above print face down on top and then laid a piece of clear plexiglass on top and closed the frame. I opened the aperture all the way up to f4.5 as I was printing through the back of the paper now. I made two test strips one with the #00 contrast filter and the other with the #5 contrast filter.
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| Test Strip Paper inter-negative f4.5 #00 |
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| Test Strip Paper inter-negative f4.5 #5 |
I liked the high contrast #5 filter better and thought 12" might be a good exposure. I sandwiched a piece of unexposed paper under the face down print withe the plexiglass on top.
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| From Paper Inter-negative f4.5 #5 12 sec |
Nice but I also tried 16".
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| From Paper Inter-negative f4.5 #5 116 sec |
Better I think. Next I wanted to try a higher contrast print from the leaf. So ran a test strip at #5 filter.
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| Test Strip f11 #5 |
This is the thing with high contrast filters, you can go from almost nothing to too much in one stop. So I thought that I wanted a half stop more than 32" which is 45" (2^5=32, 2^6=64, 2^5.5=45). Worried about losing highlight detail I also exposed for 8" with the #00 filter.
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| Leaf Print f11 #5 45 sec #00 8 sec |
Overall successful so now I may print different leaves.
Then the usual test strips...
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