Contact Printing Experiments-Azo vs. Velox

I admit that a serious deficiency in my darkroom work up to this point has been contact printing aside from doing quick whole-roll checks on on recently developed film.

A while back, I picked up a dedicated 4x5 contact printing box along with a whole bunch of ancient but seemingly good condition contact paper-a selection of both Azo and Velox. The printing box seems to have likely been home made, but likely from plans in a magazine-it's a beautiful wood box with a two porcelain sockets in the bottom-one with a standard 60W incandescent and the other a low-power red carbon filament bulb(the red bulb is always on, while the white bulb is controlled by a switch on the side). A few inches above the bulbs is a diffuser made of a few pieces of thin paper(rice paper?) between two glass plates, and then several inches above that is clear glass with a wooden clamp plate above it to hold the film and paper against the glass. I also have a big pile of different sized masks for film from 35mm half frame up to 4x5. It's too nice NOT to use.

I went through and cleaned the box up, and decided this evening to get to printing. The paper I have that is marked with an expiration date has dates from the late 40s, but I know Azo at least is legendary in its ability to keep. So, I started printing with that.

I started with a 60 second exposure and ended up with completely black paper, so kept dialing it back and settled on 3 seconds(I am using a Gralab digital timer to turn the box on and off). This particular packet had been fogged a bit at one end, but otherwise looked good and I had a print as beautiful and as sharp as I would have expected-and that was without noticing I'd flipped the negative(I should have as I've printed this a lot)! The test negative was a quick candid portrait of my girlfriend taken with a 150mm Sonnar on my Hasselblad on Tri-X and properly exposed/developed(D76 1:1). BTW, I'm developing the paper in Dektol followed by stop/fix/hypo clear/running water rinse. I know Amidol is often cited for Azo, but I have Dektol and didn't want to buy or mix a new developer when I wasn't even sure whether or not the paper was good.

I know this particular negative, despite being correctly exposed, is a bit tricky to print since it's contrasty, and I generally print it at a 1 or even 1/2 on VC paper. So, even though I got a serviceable print, it was still a bit too contrasty for me. All of the Azo I have is in grade 3 and 4, and my initial prints were done on grade 3. So, to pull contrast, I went to the Velox-I both have a lot more of it and have it down to a grade 2.

It took me a bit of experimenting to adjust the exposure, but ended up at 4 seconds developed the same as the Azo.

On looking closer at it, though, I'm really unhappy with the results on Velox. I KNOW this is a good, sharp negative as I've printed a cropped version of it to a sharp 8x10 with grain only visible under magnification. The Azo contact also looked good aside-again-from having too much contrast. The prints I'm seeing on Velox, though, are frankly terrible. Specifically, I'm seeing a lot of grain, particularly in the shadows.

Is this a sign that my 70+ year old Velox is bad?

Along those same lines, I know that Azo is supposedly produced in small batches by niche makers, but it's quite pricey. Freestyle sells ADOX Lupex, which is claimed to be a chloride contact paper. Does anyone have any experience with this? It's not exactly cheap, but is a bit more price friendly than the new equivalent of Azo.

The contact printer that I had when I first started used a 10 watt bulb.

Reminds me, though, not so many years ago I saw a Kodak contact printer

in a Goodwill store, a big wooden box with four 150W lamps.

More recently if I want contact prints, I do it using an enlarger as the

light source, with paper, negative, and glass sheet to hold it down.

This works with normal enlarging paper, which is much faster than

enlarging papers of some years ago.

I might have some old Velox or Azo. I do remember Velox as

the first paper I used, many years ago.

I don't know why you would see grain in a printing paper but I'm haven't used either of the papers that you have and I have never made lot of contact prints. But, that won't stop me from having a little input!

First, I would guess that the printing box that you have was not last used to make "fine prints". The 60W bulb results in printing times that are too short to fine tune. This was probably being used to rapidly mass produce either many prints from the same few negatives or to make test prints from a large batch of negatives. I would recommend finding a lower wattage bulb and getting printing times into the 15-30 second range. This is particularly true since the timer that you are using doesn't do a great job of giving repeatable results at short intervals and can only be set for full second.

To look into the grain issue . . . I suppose it's possible that the diffuser in your box isn't smooth enough. Try the same exposure times with an unexposed, fixed, piece of film and see if the "grain" that you see is actually coming from the rice paper diffuser.

The first contact printer that I owned, had a 10 watt bulb, and I used it with Velox.

I believe the next Christmas, when I was nine, I got a Vivitar enlarger, I presume the

not so fancy version.

Not so many years ago, though, I saw a Kodak contact printer in a Goodwill store.

It was big, made of wood, and had four 150W bulbs in it. I probably should have

bought it and donated it to a museum, though I don't know any good photography

museums around here.

Now, if I want to make contact prints, I do it under the enlarger with no negative

in place, and a glass plate over the enlarging paper and negative. That results

in times like normal enlargement times.