MorseBlog

I was scanning some of my brother's 35mm Kodachrome slides from a backpacking trip he did many years ago in the Mazatzals in central Arizona. I was struck by one photo of some Manzanita bushes and thought that would be good to print in Black and White. The slide is below. I would need to transform it from a color positive to a black and white negative. I have done this before with a paper inter-negative but settled on a film inter-negative which I have done before as well. This time however I decided to try a different method of creating an inter-negative. The slide is 35 mm so I figured 6 x 4.5 cm would be a close enough fit for aspect ratio. I didn't want to deal with roll film as I would get committed to an entire roll of film. I can also get four of this size negative from a sheet of 4x5 film. So I started with some Fomapan 100 film which I cut to the 5x4.5 cm size pieces. I mounted the slide in the enlarger and adjusted it to focus as a 6 x 4.5 sized image. Th...

My saga of printing Kodachrome processed as a black and white negative continues. I had posted my earlier efforts to process an old roll of exposed Kodachrome film here . I was stymied by the high orange content due to the orange filter base. Normal photographic paper is insensitive to red and it frustrated all attempts to print it. I thought that if I could find panchromatic paper I could have better results. In another post I reported on using some old panchromatic Kodak Panalure I bought online. Alas the paper was too fogged with age to give any satisfactory answer to my idea. I had found out about Ilford Digital Silver paper which is meant to be laser exposed and is panchromatic. It is only available in 100 ft to 500 ft  rolls. Not affordable for a little experimentation. Eventually I ran into a company in the US that sells boxes of 8x10 sheets of the stuff. It is aimed at pinhole camera users.  Photo Warehouse  sells a lot of old-school and different photographic...

Hmm interesting title. Some time back I outlined in a post ( here ) my attempts to develop an old roll of Kodachrome using black and white processing. While I got a few very interesting images when manipulated in Photoshop all attempts at making prints that measured up fell short. This was due to the orthochromatic nature of the paper and the fact that much of the negative was either yellow or orange which the paper is blind to. I concluded that I needed to find some panchromatic paper. Research revealed that Ilford makes panchromatic paper called Digital Silver for use with laser-based digital printing systems. It is unfortunately only available in 100ft (or longer) roll. Not exactly amateur friendly. However I recently learned that there were at one time other panchromatic papers made. They were aimed primarily at those that would want to make black and white prints from color negatives and render shades of red as something more than white. Unfortunately this stuff hasn't been...

This past week I read an article about a photographic exhibit called Memory City  which explores Rochester New York (Kodak's headquarters). In the article it was mentioned that some photos were taken with Kodachrome and processed as Black and White. I remembered I had an old roll from around 2009 that though exposed never made it to Dwayne's in time before the last rolls were developed. I researched on-line how to process it. Most examples I saw used D-76 developer and recommended at least 1-2 stops overexposure. The exposed film I had was shot as box rated and I do not have any D-76 and did not want to purchase any. I failed to find anyone who used LC29 (Ilford) on Kodachrome. I noticed the development times were generally extra long compared to black and white so I took a recipe for TMAX and LC29 and extended the development time. In this case I used 7:30 minutes as 22 degrees C. The developer came out dark gray presumably from the remjet backing coating. After stop and fix...