Paper Negatives
Paper Negatives in place of Film (Particularly 8x10)
I used Ilford 8x10 Multigrade Glossy RC paper.
First things first, this is NOT a replacement for negative film. It is rather a cheaper alternative to getting some hands-on experience with whatever view camera and deciding if it’s the right fit for the images you want to make. A box of 100 sheets of paper is currently about $130 on B&H, making each sheet about $1.3 compared to a box of FP4 (25 Sheets) being $195 and coming out to nearly $8 a sheet.
What is needed is as follows:
Painters or Gaffers Tape, 6x6 multigrade filters, and a place to process the paper, and make contact sheets if you like.
Many of us who dedicate time to working in a darkroom are likely familiar with paper negatives. For this entry, I will be assuming that you know the basics of darkroom processing and contact printing. Paper negatives are a cheaper means of recording images, especially with view cameras since the size of a cut sheet of film and the sizes of darkroom papers are the same.
At the time I’m writing this, I’ve gotten a few “usable” images. I’ve found that if you put a 00 filter on the back of the lens, and make an image which has flatter and more diffused lighting, you get something halfway decent.
When taking images outside in sunlight on a day with clear skies, I noticed that in the negative there seemed to be detail in both my highlights and shadows. However even with the 00 filter on the lens, the range between midtone to highlight or shadows was very difficult to print in the darkroom. When post processing the scanned negative in photoshop I was able to push my shadows and highlights heavily to get an okay looking image. In the future I will likely play around with the zone system techniques, and flashing the paper to see if a less contrasty image in daylight can be made.
For any exposure past a ½ second, I doubled my exposure time. I had a couple of images taken at a half second or slower, inconsistently there was nothing recorded on the paper. With my rough reciprocity failure time, I’ve had luck in getting decently exposed images.
Scanning:
I used a flatbed scanner to digitize these, with the flatbed I’d typically go into the curve while scanning to open up my shadow and highlight detail then further refine my edit in photoshop. I’d imagine that using a DSLR to scan the paper negatives would produce a sharper image, but I’ve not yet tried this.
Printing in the darkroom: I was able to make a couple of contact prints in the darkroom. I had some thoughts while printing. The first of which was the loss of sharpness, with printing an image through one piece of paper to another, it’s natural that there will be a noticeable amount of detail which does not translate to the print. Another was the difficulty of burning and dodging. The image I made in the shower was the best of the bunch, but the window and area around it needed heavy dodging, and this was difficult to do accurately. I did use filters over my lens while printing, but it did not limit the contrast quite as much as I would have hoped. Again I was hitting that issue of having the detail in highlights and shadows vanish pretty quickly. Overall, I was able to get one image I deemed acceptable from contact printing. In my opinion, you gain far more control when scanning these images and processing on a screen.
But again, if you use film, you can make contact prints, enlargements, or inkjet prints without any loss of quality larger than you would need.
The Basics:
Tape the 6x6 00 filter onto the back of your view camera lens, load the paper into a film holder, and everything else is the same as taking a normal photo with a view camera.
I settled to rate the ISO of the paper at 6, and adjusted my exposure to add back ⅓ of a stop of light for the filter. I was able to focus with the filter over my lens just fine.
