What may be your best suggestions to obtain slides from your prints for exhibition???????? I certainly miss the Polaroid Insta film, and I certainly have spent a lot of extra $'s on tungston film/processing, errors of glare etc, etc... Making slides of prints is a pain in the butt, so hence the question for your suggestions/recommendations/shortcuts, etc etc. Thank you
For many decades I made a modest living up here in the Rust Belt of Massachusetts shooting mundane jobs like corporate slide shows.
I am no longer in business because all of this work has dried up. I am told by those precious few local corporations who have not yet gone bankrupt nor moved to China that their secretaries do the slides in-house with their PC’s.
Every week when Kodak discontinues another film the reason given is that photographers are now shooting that task digitally and no longer buy that film.
It would seem logical, therefore, that some local digital service bureau in your area could whip up these slides for you on their PC’s more cheaply and quickly than you can.
I don't really find copy work that difficult. Once you have one or two basic setups down, most of it is pretty much the same. I usually shoot with the camera on a copy stand and lens appropriate to the size of the work and use two Norman LH2000 heads with plain 5" reflectors at 45 degrees to the work surface for even coverage (check corners and center with an incident meter and a flat diffuser) and no reflections. I don't use cross polarization unless the work is textured, like an oil painting. Sometimes I use a copy stand with 5000K fluorescent tubes, and this is even easier. Life gets more complicated when the work is very large and can't be moved or needs to hang on a wall (quicker, I find, to get the camera and the work parallel on a copy stand) or needs four lights instead of two.
I made a bracket to enable me to mount a Hasselblad in place of my enlarger head, so I could put the print on the baseboard or floor, using the vacuum flattener if required.
You can put the print under glass, but then it is best to use shift to avoid seeing the reflection of the camera in the slide.
If you do not have a vacuum base board, or a copy stand, working vertically can be difficult, as the tripod legs get in the way, and working horizontally can be a pain, as to have to support the subject picture: working at about 45 degrees can work better.
You can use a Sinar Monorail as an optical bench.
Is it 35mm slides you want to produce? Remember that most 35mm SLR view finders do not give you exactly the area you get in the slide: The Nikon F5 is one of the few that do, and I acquired one for copy work.
If you want large transparencies, to exhibit as back lit pictures, you can photograph digitally and print on transparent film on an inkjet.
There is someone in the UK who will produce low res slides from digital files.
It is, of course sacrilege to produce 35mm slides of LF prints, and you can buy MF projectors (e.g. the Hasselblad PCP80) very cheaply.
You can use an incident meter to gauge evenness of illumination, but a spot (flash) meter would be better for setting the camera, and to asses the contrast ratio for choice of film (lattitude).
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