Contact printing 5x7 & 4x5 with specific requirements- HABS + HAER photographer

[schafphoto]

Hi all,

I am a HABS + HAER photographer and recently finished a few large jobs that require more than the normal quantity of contact prints from 4x5 and 5x7 negatives. I'm willing to hire a welder, break out the radial-arm-saw, and contact the glass company in town to cobble together a contact-printing-frame-easel that will let me do many contacts in a row with as little monkeying around as possible. a sort of assembly line approach.

I've already jimmy'd a oscillating fan to agitate my trays so I can continue printing while the prints agitate... so this shouldn't be too hard, I already have some ideas. I'm sure most of you don't do contact printing in large numbers, but I 'm sure some of you have already noodled this over and have built a better mousetrap, so why should I reinvent the wheel?

Here's the setup:

5x7 film needs to be contacted onto 5x7 double weight fiber paper under an enlarger.
(I occasionally do minor burn/dodge by waving my hand in the light path.)
I'd like to align the paper and neg perfectly square without touching the glass above the neg or the negative itself or using two hands. I was thinking of getting a 10x12 piece of thick glass (1/4 inch) that would give me the weight I need, and 5x12 inch side of the glass I can grab onto that's outside the 5x7 area over the neg & paper.

Here's the why:

Imagine printing 200 contacts from 20 negatives. I don't want to use paper larger than the film because that wastes paper/money, but also HABS guidelines require 4x5 and 5x7 contact prints the exact same size as the film, showing the whole clear rebate edges of the film. (If I were to lay the 5x7 neg on a piece of 8x10 paper like I often do on smaller jobs, I wouldn't need to worry about alignment, I'd just trim off the 4 black borders later, but here that requires 4 cuts x200 sheets.)
The glossy FB paper has a slight curl, so there has to be heavy glass or a weighted frame (or pressure via a clip, etc. but a clip takes two hands x200 that will slow down the process)

Any thoughts regarding this invention would be appreciated! I've been lurking this list for years, it's great, finally signed up, thanks in advance for the help.

-Schaf

[Gene McCluney]

I built myself a contact printing box...made out of a rather deep 11x14 plywood box, painted white on the inside, and a hole drilled on one end big enough for the "business" end of a dichroic color head. (I used one designed for medium-format) I then took an opal sheet of glass (11x14) sits on the top open end of the box..and taped it on. I used a light-meter reading the top of the opal glass to determine where to put foamcore baffles inside to even out the light. I then constructed a hinged lid with foam on the inside, and a latch. I put the negative on the opal glass, emulsion up, and I have taped down "L" shaped corner I can run the negative and paper up against, close the door, latch and expose. If there needs some dodge and burn corrections, I put strip or pieces of glassine or other semi-transparent material on the underside of the opal glass. The opal glass is "milky" enough to not show any hard outlines of things on the bottom side. I hope my description was clear. I used to do large quantity of 8x10 color prints and type. I would trim the 810 color negative to about 7x10 and strip a litho negative of type at the bottom with the company name and product description. B/W would be identical except you wouldn't have to color balance.

[Kirk Gittings]

Schaf,

When did HABS start accepting double weight paper? These are the current paper specs on the NPS site and have always been that I now of?

[schafphoto]

I was talking with Josh at the HABS office in Washington last month and he said that since single-weight paper was difficult or nearly impossible to get, they have not been returning submittals on double-weight paper. In his view it was better to have the submittal in double-weight than not at all. They are very focused on the "FILM" processing, washing, protection... less so for the prints, which were never meant to have the same 500 year life-expectancy (LE) as the film was.

So any tricks to getting a lot of contacts done? As I remember single weight paper had a tendency to curl a bit as well.

-Schaf

[schafphoto]

Gene, thanks for the description, I think I can see it in my head. If you can post a photo somewhere it would be great too. I think any design will need to have a right angle backstop for the film and paper to slide against in order to be in register.

-Schaf

[Gene McCluney]

Gene, thanks for the description, I think I can see it in my head. If you can post a photo somewhere it would be great too. I think any design will need to have a right angle backstop for the film and paper to slide against in order to be in register.

-Schaf

Correct. You make one out of matt board and tape it to the opal glass.

[William McEwen]

When Alan Ross makes his Ansel Adams Special Edition prints, everything is printed by projection, including 8x10 prints of 8x10 negatives. I guess this is for speed.

http://www.anseladams.com/content/care_collecting/SEP_processing_methods.html

[nolindan]

Try a pre-press graphic arts vacuum frame:

http://www.douthittcorp.com/dl.htm

Use a large sheet of paper and place multiple negatives on the sheet and slice into 4x5 sheets after processing. One 16x20 sheet of paper will print 20 negatives. You can make dodging and burning masks that you lay on top of the glass.

Surplus graphic arts vacuum frames are available for next to nothing used, though most have already been scrapped and prices are going back up. Brands are nuArc, Screen, Douthitt, Amerigraph, Burgess...

[jnantz]

schaf

when i have a job like that, i usually make all the prints from each negative at the same time ( including 2 extras ) ...
then i back to back them between my fingers and soup all the like prints at the same time.
tray rockers ( i guess that is what you rigged with your fan ? ) help to make sure they
all get agitated well ...
do all the negatives that seem the same lighting &C first, so you can guesstimate your exposures for the prints that follow.

i hope you have enough room to dry each "run" ...
THAT is usually the achilles heal

good luck!

john

[Kirk Gittings]

When Alan Ross makes his Ansel Adams Special Edition prints, everything is printed by projection, including 8x10 prints of 8x10 negatives. I guess this is for speed.

http://www.anseladams.com/content/care_collecting/SEP_processing_methods.html

All HABS and HAER work is contact printed only.

[mcfactor]

Maybe I'm being snobby (and definitely off topic), but is anyone else disappointed that modern Adams prints are made on Ilford Multigrade (rather than a graded paper which would probably be closer to Adam's personal vision)?

[Kirk Gittings]

Maybe I'm being snobby (and definitely off topic), but is anyone else disappointed that modern Adams prints are made on Ilford Multigrade (rather than a graded paper which would probably be closer to Adam's personal vision)?

I assume you are referring to Alan Ross making his Ansel Adams Special Edition prints. No I am not disappointed. Alan is a master printer and knows exactly what he is doing. He has been printing these portfolios for what? Like 20 years?

[Robbie Shymanski]

Single-weight papers by Slavich are available in #2 & #3 grades from Freestyle. Also, if you are making a submission directly to HABS and not going through a state agency, you might consider contacting HABS and discussing making digital prints as they have been doing in-house for several years now. They have not created public standards for this yet, but they will accept if you speak with them.

[schafphoto]

I heard about NPS doing digital prints in-house, but I'm not sure it is a real time saver??? In order to get the entire negative scanned including the edges I would ned to scan on a glass carrier, crop and straighten the image in Photoshop, tweek the levels, and send to a printer. In order to get a borderless 4x5, I'd still need to trim all 4 sides, not a huge time saver. And I'm not sure I can convince my clients that the new, untested way is better, most have been submitting HABS the old way for decades...and have to go through the regional NPS office.

Besides I'm looking for ways to justify to my wife the need for my darkroom... and new equipment... ;-)

As far as a vacuum frame I have one, but while it will hold the paper flat I still need glass to hold the negs in contact. So why not have the glass do the flattening and avoid the noise of a vacuum???

[William McEwen]

I assume you are referring to Alan Ross making his Ansel Adams Special Edition prints. No I am not disappointed. Alan is a master printer and knows exactly what he is doing. He has been printing these portfolios for what? Like 20 years?

Ross has been printing them since 1975. That makes it 34 years.

I have three I purchased in the early 1980s. It might be interesting to purchase the latest prints of the same images and compare side by side.

(But I'm not going to.)

[schafphoto]

Single-weight papers by Slavich are available in #2 & #3 grades from Freestyle.

I just contacted 21 negatives from a HAER job in Santa Paula, and 18 were grade 0.5, grade 1 or grade 1.5. All negs N-1 development. None of these prints have the 'SNAP' and contrast I would print fine art, but they are often shot at 10:00AM, 11:00AM, Noon, 1:00PM, 2:00PM and 3:00PM. Not the ideal times I would go out and shoot fine-art photos, but there is usually a deadline and all the photos need to be done in one or two days. That unfortunately leaves the middle of the day as prime shooting hours, so if I want to get a little shadow detail I have to take it in the form of N-1 negatives printed on grade Zero to One MG papers. I am on Freestyle's Board of Advisors for infrared films, so I hope I can advise them to carry a MG single weight paper, (but it still won't be like AZO).

[jnantz]

since the habs department relieved themselves of state+locally significant sites &C
and left it to the states to record, the states have really been swayed
to accept digital only submissions. now many of the states
( at least here in the northeast) documentations digital files ( no film ) and ink jet prints.

from conversations with the folks in DC at the habs office, they had no intentions
of accepting digital submissions. there have been nightmarish problems
with some of the departments that have accepted digital submissions,
and a huge number of these images became corrupt and useless .....
it is hard to corrupt a sheet of film so it won't print, if it is filed in its
" unbuffered thumb tabbed envelope and print tipped onto a photo mount card "

i remember when national register nomination forms switched from fiber based paper to RC paper ...
mainly because the cost of a lab making fiber prints was through the roof compared to
RC prints ... but at least it was an across the board kind of thing - everyone in the country
submitted RC prints ... but it wasn't a patchwork like now,
where some states accept digital only submissions,
others accept 35mm and 4x6 enlargements,
and still others only accept 4x5 (or larger) and contact prints like a true habs submission ...

maybe in 2 years things have changed ?

[Kirk Gittings]

maybe inn 2 years things have changed ?

I only get interested in this topic when I do a HABS project, which seems to run sporadically these days. My last one was like two years ago. On-the-other-hand, Robbie (who commented above), a former student of mine, may have the most up-to-date info as his masters thesis (in progress) is HABS documentation and I know he has spent a fair amount of time in DC with the folks at HABS.

[jnantz]

thanks kirk ..

sorry for being a doubting thomas, robbie ...
john

[Robbie Shymanski]

From my conversations with HABS in DC:

-the basis for all HABS/HAER/HALS is and will be film. By that, BW negatives with color transparencies are the primary archival format. They have a proven passive archival stability and, of course, a 75-year history with archiving this format. Their belief is that until film to their standards become unavailable across the board, they are sticking with film as it keeps to the archival goals of HABS (500-year material lifespan).

-due to the end of the production of Kodak AZO single-weight paper HABS has internally begun to use pigment-based inkjet prints as the reference print that accompanies submission of the primary film artifact. These prints are on Epson Ultra Premium Matte Presentation Paper. The print is at 1:1 to the negative/transparency. HABS likes this because it saves space, which is the prime motive for using single-weight, but it also removes the need for a mounting card for the said contact print. The standard "Historic American Buildings Survey See Index to Photographs for Captions HABS No. XX-XXXX-001" can also be printed with the image. It is a much cleaner process. And they have no problem with PS manipulation of dodge/burn and tone/contrast as this print is only a secondary reference to the primary artifact of the exposed film.

-there is no filmless "digital" submission in the foreseeable future. For the sake of physical archiving, film is king.

All my information comes from conversations with Jack Boucher, Jet Lowe, and Catherine Lavoie within a year.

Another thing to add to this is that HABS proper tends to be much more flexible than some SHPOs regarding adherence to HABS Standards/Guidelines.

[Kirk Gittings]

Thanks for that clarification Robbie.

[jnantz]

thanks robbie!

john

[schafphoto]

Thanks Robbie,

You iterate what I found when talking to James Rosenthal at HABS a couple months ago. He did mention that the Collections people at the Library of Congress still get excited when a job comes in on fiber prints, since that is happening less and less, but that may be more of a preference on the part of the archivists than a policy of LOC.

I'd love to read your Thesis when you're finished, please send me a link. I've always wondered why no one has ever done a "Best of HABS" or "HAER Greatest Hits" book with the amazing images and amazing photographers that have contributed to that Public Domain archive. Seems everything else in the public domain has been published, even Ansel's dusty images of the west from the LOC.

-Schaf

[Kirk Gittings]

Robbie, It looks like early August for the Chicago job. Are you going to be around?

[Robbie Shymanski]

There are actually quite a number of books that have been published of "HABS greatest hits". Back pre-WWII, HABS would print out books of photographs that covered the all the projects within a state. There is Jack Boucher's "A Record in Detail", that are his personal favorite images. And there is Jet Lowe's book, that cover his selections of work for HAER, whose title slips my mind. And there is also a current series of books that have been published over the past few years that examine specific building types that solely uses HABS photography.

Kirk, of course I will be here. Own a house. I ain't goin' nowhere.

[schafphoto]

The May 2010 HABS/HAER/HALS guidelines are now out, it's official...

"Each photograph transmitted to the Library of Congress requires a large format safety film negative (4”x5”, 5”x7”, or 8”x10”) and a contact print, archivally processed, on fiber based paper. Resin coated papers are not archival. Due to the difficulty of obtaining materials, double or single weight fiber based enlarging paper may be used in place of contact paper."

I submitted a HALS 5x7 job in May on double weight and everyone in washington seemed very pleased, even got a thank you letter from Paul Dolinski. Of course that was a documentation of Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, that I did as a donation since the place is in shambles after the Northridge earthquake, it was nice that they appreciated the donation. And BTW the donation process was very easy... they want HABS/HAER/HALS records in the Library of Congress.

[chris_4622]

The new Lodima paper is thinner than double weight but not as thin as single weight. Didn't know if you are aware of this product.

chris

[squinonescolon]

Stephen,
I'm doing a job right now in Berkeley, I was looking at your website and you have a photo of a perforated photo holder, where did you get those? I would like to use it for this job.
Thanks
Steven