Please share your darkroom prints from B&W slides

[Certain Exposures]

I am interested in making some black and white slides. However, I enjoy darkroom printing. I am sure some of you have already figured out how to address this problem. Please share your prints! Also, please let me know:

- if there is a simple way to darkroom print black and white slides or is it as complicated as making them
- whether you observe an obvious improvement in quality compared to your prints of negatives

I Googled to find information on this, but I could not find a satisfactory answer.

Thank you in advance for sharing your work.

[Bertha DeCool]

I have 40 yr old B&W 35mm slides from a direct-positive process we used in school that I've thought about enlarging onto Ilford/Harman direct-positive paper but I'm currently only contact printing 5x7 and lacking sufficient darkroom space/enlarger.
From what I've read about folks shooting this paper in-camera, a pre-flash reduces its inherent contrasty nature. It's pretty slow, ISO 3-6, I'd imagine it'd print b&w slides nicely.
There're a l few threads on here that have been running for awhile.

[Certain Exposures]

I have 40 yr old B&W 35mm slides from a direct-positive process we used in school that I've thought about enlarging onto Ilford/Harman direct-positive paper but I'm currently only contact printing 5x7 and lacking sufficient darkroom space/enlarger.
From what I've read about folks shooting this paper in-camera, a pre-flash reduces its inherent contrasty nature. It's pretty slow, ISO 3-6, I'd imagine it'd print b&w slides nicely.
There're a l few threads on here that have been running for awhile.

Thank you for responding. I just looked up a thread and saw great images. I will link it. It looks like most people are using the paper directly instead of enlarging, but at least this gives you an idea of the results. A comment online lead me to believe there was not a simple way to enlarge slides in the darkroom.

https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?80271-Harman-Direct-Positive-Images/page8&highlight=direct+positive+paper

[Mark Sampson]

Generally, the reason people used to shoot b/w reversal was to make 35mm slides for projection. Now I suppose people scan b/w positives, but I don't know what (if any) the advantages of that might be. Enlarging b/w positives to make prints could be done, but it's certainly going the long way around. If you want b/w slides, it would be easier just to shoot negatives in the camera and then copy them in a slide-duplicating setup. We used to use Kodak's Fine Grain Release Positive 5302 film for that purpose- although that film must be long discontinued, there are likely films available in the cinema world meant to do the same thing. A good b/w transparency can be a lovely thing to see- best of luck!

[Bertha DeCool]

Generally, the reason people used to shoot b/w reversal was to make 35mm slides for projection. Now I suppose people scan b/w positives, but I don't know what (if any) the advantages of that might be. Enlarging b/w positives to make prints could be done, but it's certainly going the long way around. If you want b/w slides, it would be easier just to shoot negatives in the camera and then copy them in a slide-duplicating setup. We used to use Kodak's Fine Grain Release Positive 5302 film for that purpose- although that film must be long discontinued, there are likely films available in the cinema world meant to do the same thing. A good b/w transparency can be a lovely thing to see- best of luck!

We used Pan-X and a process that included re-exposing the film and then redeveloping in a paper developer. I have the formulas somewhere...
I can highly recommend dr5, a lab now located in Iowa that does a proprietary direct-positive process for b&w chromes for any size film. I agree that most would be for scanning and then inkjet printing. There's a company in VT that sells inks for Epson printers that replace CMY with shades of gray from black to white.

I'm shooting 5x7 now so I can contact print without an enlarger, so my interest in printing direct to Harmon DPP has waned for now. For me the advantafe to b&w slides was in preserving the tonal range that gets lost when printing to paper.

I still have a 100' can of Pan-X in the freezer, maybe I'll dig up that formula someday.

[Certain Exposures]

Generally, the reason people used to shoot b/w reversal was to make 35mm slides for projection. Now I suppose people scan b/w positives, but I don't know what (if any) the advantages of that might be. Enlarging b/w positives to make prints could be done, but it's certainly going the long way around. If you want b/w slides, it would be easier just to shoot negatives in the camera and then copy them in a slide-duplicating setup. We used to use Kodak's Fine Grain Release Positive 5302 film for that purpose- although that film must be long discontinued, there are likely films available in the cinema world meant to do the same thing. A good b/w transparency can be a lovely thing to see- best of luck!

Thanks, Mark. I am 3 years late - sorry. I must have been distracted by another thread at the time. I am revisiting this idea once again!

[Certain Exposures]

We used Pan-X and a process that included re-exposing the film and then redeveloping in a paper developer. I have the formulas somewhere...
I can highly recommend dr5, a lab now located in Iowa that does a proprietary direct-positive process for b&w chromes for any size film. I agree that most would be for scanning and then inkjet printing. There's a company in VT that sells inks for Epson printers that replace CMY with shades of gray from black to white.

I'm shooting 5x7 now so I can contact print without an enlarger, so my interest in printing direct to Harmon DPP has waned for now. For me the advantafe to b&w slides was in preserving the tonal range that gets lost when printing to paper.

I still have a 100' can of Pan-X in the freezer, maybe I'll dig up that formula someday.

Hi Bertha. I am curious if you still have this Pan-X? Have you tried any lately? I have a35mm film projector now so I am revisiting this idea.

[ic-racer]

This is the setup I'm planning on using. I have not used it yet however.

Basically I will enlarge the 35mm slides onto 6x6cm rollfilm. There is not shutter in this camera, so I'll have to use the enlarger timer.

244145

[Certain Exposures]

This is the setup I'm planning on using. I have not used it yet however.

Basically I will enlarge the 35mm slides onto 6x6cm rollfilm. There is not shutter in this camera, so I'll have to use the enlarger timer.

244145

This looks interesting! Let us know how it goes.

[Vaughan]

You could try enlarging onto Harman Direct Positive paper. Not sure that the contract will look like, but it can be flashed.

[Certain Exposures]

You could try enlarging onto Harman Direct Positive paper. Not sure that the contract will look like, but it can be flashed.

I tried that once with 35mm color slide film. The resulting print was super high contrast.

I would have preferred less contrast but I could see some people liking it for certain subjects.

Also, I did not go as far as trying flashing or other techniques to reduce the contrast at the time because I ran out of paper and money :).

[Drew Wiley]

No problem at all. You just generate a lower-contrast internegative from the b&w slide, preferably onto sheet film, and print from that. That way you can print on any paper you wish.

But it would make more sense overall to shoot the scene normally for sake of a printing negative per se. Then you could optionally use the same negative to generate an inter-positive - a slide. That would be a more versatile option than doing reversal processing of the original.

Since you're planning on working in small film sizes at a very modest scale of reproduction, you might want to look into a 105mm Apo Rodagon D (duplicating) enlarging lens. It's designed for such purposes, and will probably do a better job than general-purpose enlarging lenses.

[Certain Exposures]

No problem at all. You just generate a lower-contrast internegative from the b&w slide, preferably onto sheet film, and print from that. That way you can print on any paper you wish.

But it would make more sense overall to shoot the scene normally for sake of a printing negative per se. Then you could optionally use the same negative to generate an inter-positive - a slide. That would be a more versatile option than doing reversal processing of the original.

Since you're planning on working in small film sizes at a very modest scale of reproduction, you might want to look into a 105mm Apo Rodagon D (duplicating) enlarging lens. It's designed for such purposes, and will probably do a better job than general-purpose enlarging lenses.

Thanks! Interested ideas to think about. I'll report back when I get around to trying some of this. It might be a bit because I have a few camera issues to workout.

[MartinP]

This is the setup I'm planning on using. I have not used it yet however.

Basically I will enlarge the 35mm slides onto 6x6cm rollfilm. There is not shutter in this camera, so I'll have to use the enlarger timer.

244145

Way back last century, I had to make enlargements from 35mm slides at work and the usual method was to make an interneg by projection (ie. using an enlarger to project the image, not a slide-projector) on 4x5" panchromatic film in a DDS (we used PlusX for all these sorts of tasks), then to print from that neg to get the final result. It always seemed to work adequately, though many people since then have said that making an interneg by contact-printing is the only way to achieve a quality result. I do recall that working from medium-format we would use an 8x10" interneg, so maybe the size of the in-between step, relative to the original, has a bearing on the result.