4x5 b&w ; scan, or contact print?

[Brian Ellis]

Contact printing is very nice but you said you have a 4x5 camera. Contact prints of 4x5 negatives are generally too small to be very practical in terms of showing them to anyone and not really very satisfactory even just for yourself. 5x7 is generally considered to be the smallest size that can produce a usable contact print (usable in the sense of exhibiting, even to friends). 4x5 film scanners are very expensive, as you've discovered. However, the flat bed scanners supposedly have been improving to a point where you can do something with the print other than just show it over the web. I don't have any personal experience with them. Unfortunately with 4x5 negatives I think you really need an enlarger or a good lab to get the kind of quality you should be getting out of large format.

[Joe Sonneman]

My answer to contact print or enlarge or scan was settled when a salesman at Chicago's Standard Photo [now gone or moved] noticed me drooling over an 8x10 Burke & James then [long ago] marked at $100. He offered it to me for $50 and I grabbed it, later finding a 14" Commercial Ektar. I knew I had neither space nor money for an 8x10 enlarger, not even for a 4x5 enlarger, and this was the pre-digital age, so contact prints were the way to go. Here was my simple set up for 8x10 contacts. I put the negative and paper in a wooden printing frame [glass front, metal spring back]. This I set down, face up, on a shelf or bench. Overhead, I suspended by its electrical cord an electric light, with 7 or 15w bulb, in a large reflector. For a diffuser, I covered the reflector with double thickness of white plastic garbage bag. To increase or decrease light intensity, I would lower or raise the light by releasing or pulling the electrical cord, which ran through an 'eye' or pulley screwed into the ceiling. The cord was plugged into a Time-O-Light. That's all you need, but for quicker operation, instead of a printing frame I now use a hinged glass contact printer, mine is called a "Profile Custom Proofer." Color is another matter, however, and at present I have a few transparencies scanned [about $10 each, here] onto a CD, and can use very delicate controls even on an old Pentium 60 and even with Photoshop Deluxe [i.e., the simple sample version] into an Epson 700, which looks kind of like a new-art print when using Strathmore Velvet [matte] paper. The cost of scans gets excessive you have a lot, and scanners are getting better all the time, so I won't even try to write about THAT. Good fortune. Have fun and do good work! --Joe Sonneman, photographer, Juneau, Alaska