doing contact prints

I was wondering if anyone does contact prints from thier cameras?

I have a Hawk-Eye No2 B and the negitives are 6X9. No one in my area

has a negitive frame or holder for this size. I'm going to start

processing my own B&W, and I'm wondering if you can get a good

enlargement from a contact print with a scanner. Is the resolution

good enough? We do photo restorations and have a good scanner that I

can scan them with. The negitives are large enough that you don't

need to enlarge that much to get an 8X10.

thanks LaMar

Contact prints are no problem, just lay the negs on a sheet of 10x8, hold everything in place with a piece of glass and expose :-)

For scanning, you'll need a transparency hood on your scanner, and a negative holder ... this can be made from a piece of card. To print to A4, 10x8 or similar from a full frame a 1200dpi scan will be perfectly adequate, though you'll probably start to see the limitations of the camera lens at these sizes.

Chris

I have a scanner with the transparancy hood but it will only go to 4.5 cm I need 6 cm. I was hoping to scan contact prints since the scanner will scan the photo paper. My scanner has a native scan resolution of 2400 dpi and will go higher so resolution isn't a problem. I know that the lens will be a factor, but there is some thing about soft pictures i like. I have a Holga 120S. I love the photos it makes. What I need to know is does the contact prints have enough resolution to make this possible. Most of my experience with photography is digital and I'm finding that I enjoy the old cameras a lot! I have been picking up some from Ebay, and hope to use them all to some extent if the contact prints work.

Thanks again Chris

LaMar

I'd have reservations about trying to print to A4 or similar from a scan of a 2x3" print ... it's the nature of the system that you'll have already lost at least a degree of tonal scale as a print doesn't have the total range that a fully exposed negative has. You may not lose detail, but the final result will never be as good as a direct print from the original neg, whether this is generated conventionally or digitally.

Try it and see, you may be happy with the results, especially if the negs aren't very high contrast.

it might be a bit late, but i just discovered this beautiful site and i still want to tell you about my own experience with 6X9.

as i am from the continent of europe, i don´t have a brownie, but a collection of agfa´s 120 rollfilmcamera´s. one of them is the agfa clack. it produces - like your brownie - 6X9 negatives. as my enlarger can´t take negatives larger then 6X6 the only way to get the entire negative on photographicpaper is by making a contact print (i always make a contact print from any of my negatives). i personally like those 6X9 centimeter pictures very much. they are very sharp and - compared to a 35-mm film - they are quite big. when i want to enlarge the picture, i take the most interesting part of it and enlarge it.

but in your case (for some reason), you would like to enlarge the entire image by scanning the contaact print and enlarge it to A4. i sometimes do that to, but the quality can not be compared with an old school enlargement. maybe (probably) you got a better scanner and a better printer, so the qualtiy will increase, but i can´t believe that you van make the same quality with the way you want to do it.

but making contact prints is a lot of fun, so of course i recomment on doing that. and depending on the quality you desire, it could be well worth on making enlargements with the computer.

and keep on using the holga, it´s a beautiful piece of shyte ;)