contact printing color slide film to color slide film

[andrew_roesner]

i'd like to investigate a method of making contact prints of, say,

8x10 color slide film on 8x10 color slide film, effectivly copying

the film. is this something that people do, or that can be done? i

plan to do it in my darkroom unless this process is available at pro

labs. let me explain the intended application so you can understand

where i'm coming from. i don't own and have never used a large format

camera. i'm going to make a pinhole camera that accepts sheet film,

probably 8x10, and photograph with slide film. if all goes well i

would display the slide as the finished art. of course, i'd like some

way of duplicating the photograph and the first thing that comes to

mind is contact printing. my darkroom situation is b&w only, and cold

light at that, so i don't have the ability to color correct the light

in my enlarger. i do have a light table that happens to be corrected

to 5500K and i've thought of somehow using that. i'd obviously use a

contact printing frame but a concern with that is the color of the

background. am i correct to presume that anything besides perfect

white would influence the color of the copy? aside from that i'd send

the copies to the lab for processing just the same as the original.

any suggestions, concerns, or insight is greatly apreciated!

[mark_sampson]

To duplicate a color transparency, you'll need to use Kodak Ektachrome Duplicating film EDUPE. It's a low-contrast, tungsten-balanced film designed to do what you want. in 8x10/50 sheets, cat no 163 8444. A color-correctable light source, like a color enlarger, wil also be a necessity. And a professional E-6 lab for processing. The costs involved might make having a lab do the work a good idea. Have you considered how you will display these transparencies? Will you build a light box for each image? E-6 films are not meant for long-term illuminated viewing and they will fade. A better idea might be to shoot color negative film and contact-print the neg to Duraclear print film, which uses the RA-4 paper process and will last longer when viewed. It would still be expensive though.

[stephen hazelton]

You can buy slide copiers to use for 35mm cameras, but normally, you don't copy slide film onto regular slide film- if you do, it increases the contrast, and the duplicate doesn't look right. This was normally done with special low-contrast slide duplicating films, and I don't know if they are even available in 8x10.

 

Probably the easiest way to make the duplicates is in the camera- make multiple exposures at the time you make the original.

 

I'd make the camera first, and try it out on some B&W film- much easier to handle the processing. Then, if all looks good, try some color. Then if that looks, good, and you haven't lost interest in the meantime, worry about the duplicates.

[pete_caluori]

Hi Andrew,

 

I've tried this using 4x5 and it's not as easy as you might think. Your light source must be absolutely uniform, or your results will suffer. I seriously doubt your light tabe will provide even ilumination across the area of an 8x10.

 

E6 materials are inherinetly high contrast, so unless you use a duplicating film as was previously mentioned, you will end up with an unbelievably high contrast dupe.

 

The last problem is color balance, but that's the easiest to correct, with cc filter material.

 

Regards, Pete

[peter_witkop]

Just couple sugestions, may not fit your needs, but here goes. Portland color (www.portlandcolor.com) does do 8x10 transparency duplications, which is essentially what you're trying to do, from what I gather. They're a good lab, I've given them many rolls of e-6, havne't had any problems or heard of any. It's a little expensive ($55 per 8x10 dupe), but I imagine it'd be a bit expensive doing this yourself given e-6 materials and processing isn't real cheap. maybe I missed something in your post (if I did please ignore following suggestion :o), but why not make Ilfochrome prints (They are, in my opinion, incredible, http://www.photographictraditions.com/ - excelant traditional custom print lab for ilfochrome, and other traditional printing) or have the transparencies scanned and make lightjet (Portland Color does that too). I haven't got much experience with duping (any acctually), but I suspect that an enalrger with the correct filtly ration (or propercolor balenced film) might make things easier if you do go the DIY route, maybe even a color head for color corrections? Good luck and let us know how things turn out, maybe even share an image or two when you get to that point.

[andrew_roesner]

thanks for the responses. i was trying to avoid making multiple exposures when shooting in the field for all the obvious reasons, but that looks like the best scenario so far. cheapest too. i'll just have to be VERY calibrated with my exposeures, and from what i'm learning about slide film reciprocity the CC filters. here's a bit of a tangential question, but does such a back exist to use 8x10 film on a 5x7 camera. another way to ask it is could i rig an 8x10 back to attach to a 5x7 camera and use masking of some sort to make the 5x7 picture on the 8x10 film? thanks for the help so far, i'll keep you posted of progress.

[alan_agardi1]

Andrew -

 

Here's a real Rube Goldberg solution - and it just might work, especially since you say that "I would display the slide as the finished art."

 

Scan the 8x10 slides and print them as transparencies. Of course, you'll need some good hardware and software for this - a scanner, a printer (an Epson Stylus 3000 comes to mind), quality inks, etc.

 

I would think that the cost of doing it this way would be very cost effective, even with the purchase of the hardware and software.

 

Cheers

[ericflo]

"display the slide as finished art"

 

hi andrew!

 

visual artists do this frequently now (especially the "conceptually-inclined" artists). we usually do not display the original grabs, not even the E6 dupes, because the substrate tends to warp under gallery/museum lighting, and the colors will fade quickly.

 

for exhibitions like this what my equally non-rich colleagues and i do instead is to order DuraTrans enlargements. that's what is used for backlit billboards in shopping malls. the DuraTrans' clear film is reasonably heat-resistant, it's colors reasonably-lighfast, even under several months of outdoor UV bombardment in notorious Southeast Asian humidity.... then we keep the originals in Tupperware containers loaded with silica gel during the rainy months (which is most of the year).

 

and if you want to make copies bigger than your DuraTrans supplier can give (his computer's interpolating software might not be strong enough for the enlargement you want), you can also try sending your originals to Fuji/Kodak to be scanned at very-high res; these's a machine that writes with light directly onto a sheet of photographic film as big as 20x24inches... and THEN you could bring that to your DuraTrans guy for further enlargements.

 

btw, if you don't shoot LF, try to shoot your originals at MF at least, to give the labs some leeway. i dont think these labs will accept assignments from 35mm originals.

[gone nomad]

You could also use Ilfochrome translucent display paper. It's made for display with a light source.