To VC Or Not To VC

[Michael Feldman]

Calumet also has a good selection of graded papers. Their mail-order business ships from Chicago, which may be cheaper shipping than from NY. The trick to getting paper (and film) via mail-order is to get it while the weather is cool. Those delivery trucks get very hot in the summer.

[Jerry Flynn]

I use a Zone VI cold light head and tested every vc fb paper I could get my hands on in a week-long marathon. All showed inconsistent results -- unequal spacing between grades. In addition, I would say that the #2 filter produced a #3 or # 3 1/2 result for starters.

A bit of trivia: Ansel Adams referred to his use of DuPont Varigam with the Ferrante Codelight variable cold light head in his earlier series of books. I used Varigam back in the day and thought is was vastly superior to Polycontrast, Polycontrast Rapid and Varilour (DuPont), the other vc papers of the age.

[kthompson]

Yeah...but light is light....a number 0 filter is close to 2.5 on one of our enlargers (with an Aristo D2H, and running both Polymax II and MG IV through an Ilford paper processor)....if I want to flatten things out, I can either use a cc40Y or most of the time, I just use a -1 and 5+ to split filter everything.....or resort to flashing in cases of extreme duress.....I've been printing this way for years--not exactly by choice, but because I didn't *have* a choice at first--this was all we had. At home, I do have one of those fancy-shmancy 2 tubed VC heads you all are moaning about being "arm-twisted" to buy, and I sure wish we were arm twisted here....the one I have is the best lightsource for b&w printing I've ever used....even with graded papers. We also have 2 dichroic colorheads that work like a charm on these papers, but I've used Multigrade heads as well. Our coldlight though? It's almost twenty years old, and we use it weekly to make prints up to 20x24 on VC papers.....

BTW, you can learn alot by getting a projection step wedge and doing ring arounds with the filters...even on a condenser system, using PC filters, different brands of papers respond differently.....