How good are contact prints in reality?

[Pere Casals]

Not having a working LF enlarger

Hello Mark,

If you have a view camera you have an enlarger.

Even Graflex made the Graflarger back to convert a Graflex press camera into an enlarger.


http://www.ebay.es/itm/GRAFLEX-GRAFL...0AAOSweXhXl-Tt


But it can be done with any format. I use an old MF projector to throw light at the back of a 8x10 CAMBO, I custom built a negative holder for it. With the projector it performs like a condenser type enlarger, speakng about contrast control.
A process lens would perform better in theory, but the Sironar N works perfect.

Very straight, put paper on the wall and the camera in the tripod. Ansel Adams' enlarger was mostly that.


Scanning it's also straight... A cheap Epson V850 is perfect for BW and LF. I use Ilford Lab Direct to print on silver. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in the tips to make the print match from what you see in the monitor, using soft proofing, and comparating previous calibration prints, anyway it's explained in the ilford lab direct web site.


Best Regards.

[Mark Sawyer]

Throwing in my two cents worth...

If all you're looking for is resolution, both a good enlargement or a good contact print will go beyond what your eye can resolve.

But if you care about tonality, a good contact print is richer and more subtle than a good enlarged print.

Finally, for images made with soft focus lenses, the soft effect degrades noticeably when enlarged. The effect of soft lenses shines best in contact printing...

[Pere Casals]

Finally, for images made with soft focus lenses, the soft effect degrades noticeably when enlarged. The effect of soft lenses shines best in contact printing...

Interesting to know it...

[Mark Sawyer]

I understand that images printed using the contact printing technique are supposed to ooze with detail (film and photographic paper allowing). I haven't seen this in any of the contacts I've seen. Even with the naked eye they do not appear sharp. Under the loupe there is no detail at all. Indeed, I've seen good (non-LF) inkjet prints show more detail (resolution rather than contrast) and even better tonality although under the loupe you see the pixelations (which I can never get used to hence my liking for silver prints).

Admittedly, none of the contact prints were taken with modern lenses but I can't imagine that the older 'good' lenses are that poor in resolving power...

A properly made contact print will have all the detail of the negative, at least past the point the eye can resolve. But if you don't have good contact between the negative and the paper, it will lose significant detail.

Regarding the old lenses, there are a few turkeys among the old and the new, but old lenses are as sharp as the new for contact printing. If you ever see an original Carlton Watkins or William Henry Jackson original ULF albumen contact print, you'll see. Even the earliest Daguerreotypes have more detail than the eye can resolve. Improvements haven't been so much in improving resolution, but in eliminating aberrations, adding contrast/reducing flare (through coatings), and adding modern shutters.

[Bob Salomon]

A properly made contact print will have all the detail of the negative, at least past the point the eye can resolve. But if you don't have good contact between the negative and the paper, it will lose significant detail.

Regarding the old lenses, there are a few turkeys among the old and the new, but old lenses are as sharp as the new for contact printing. If you ever see an original Carlton Watkins or William Henry Jackson original ULF albumen contact print, you'll see. Even the earliest Daguerreotypes have more detail than the eye can resolve. Improvements haven't been so much in improving resolution, but in eliminating aberrations, adding contrast/reducing flare (through coatings), and adding modern shutters.

Not quite, Mark,
There are also improvements in distortion and fall off. Old lens may have been good but if maximum resolution, evenness of coverage, lack of distortion, best contrast, etc. the modern lens will perform much better. But it all depends on what you want and what you are satisfied with.

[Drew Wiley]

I would say that Mark's stereotypes about the two forms or printing are valid on a "good enough for government work" basis. But there are plenty of workarounds for advanced printers that confute most of those stereotypes. For one thing, it's pretty difficult to do fancy dodging and burning on a little contact print. You could register some kind of fancy mask that does that for you. But if you go to that kind of effort, you could just as well engineer this to accentuate the qualities of an enlargement. And that way you can bring out micro-details not typically visible in a smaller contact print. Tonal quality can also be forwarded all kinds of ways, and give even the best contact prints a run for their money. Again, it's the skill of the printmaker himself, and not just the character of the
medium which counts. But a silver print is never going to be precisely a platinum print, or visa versa, or an albumen print. Chocolate ice cream isn't supposed to taste like strawberry. Nice to have choices.

[Jim Noel]

A contact print made from a properly focused, exposed and properly processed negative, then properly exposed and processed on a paper designed for the process, such as Azo, Pt/Pd, or other alternative processes on hot pressed papers is a thing of absolute beauty. If any part of the process isn't up to standard, including attempting to make a contact print on enlarging paper, some part of the beauty is lost.
The most common mistake I see is using an enlarging paper which by it's nature has a shorter scale than a contact paper.

[Drew Wiley]

Numerous people have enlarged right onto contact papers. I've done it with Azo. Enlargers have even made with high-UV output for direct carbon or platinum enlarging. Maybe not the safest devices around; but this has been done much longer than most people realize. Fresson is a proprietary method using an antique carbon-arc enlarger. And like I said, the "scale" issue itself can easily be tweaked by anyone versed in advanced masking techniques. Conversely, I've seen proprietary platinum techniques offering more of a silver look, with a high D-Max and cold image tone. Now there are all kinds of hybrid options. But I would certainly agree with you, Jim, that a competently made Pt/pd etc print can have its own special kind of beauty, and really don't care about any of this
being "quantified" with a densitometer. But I also like the kind of richness and toning options that certain silver gelatin silver prints allow. I collect old albumen
prints, which have their own kind of understated richness. It's all good.

[Vaughn]

Drew made a point that I found interesting...printing larger for micro-detail.

If one decides to produce contact prints, then the image itself will be strongly driven by the size of the final print (and I suppose also by the expected viewing distance). A 40"x60" print viewed at 20 feet probably has no more micro-detail than an 8x10 contact print held in one's hands.

A recent show I had of platinum prints from contacted 6cmx6cm (120 film) images brought this to my attention. Images that would have looked great at just 8"x8" did not 'work' as contact prints -- just too busy at that size and composition fell apart. And the reverse is also can happen -- good looking small images that fall apart enlarged to bed-sheet size.

So my point? If one decides to contact print, then one will be led towards subjects and composition that work best at that size...hopefully without needing fancy masking.

[Drew Wiley]

Lots of now famous contact prints by legendary photograpers like Edward Weston or Wynn Bullock would simply fall apart at larger scale. Discrete areas of pure
black would become annoying patches of it, and many things would simply be annoyingly out of focus. And a surplus of tonality is meaningless if it's too fine for
the eye to see or the paper surface to even record. Same goes for detail. People might enjoy my big 30X40 prints for years as general compositions or color studies from a distance, but then one day walk up and discover yet another hidden detail. I had a friend who had a big print of a meadow of monkeyflower in the high country in his reception room for years, and valued it for the color and general subject; but then one day he noticed a mosquito perfectly in focus on one of
those flowers way out in the middle of that meadow. That's what large format film and serious enlargement can do. But "what if's" can be fun. And that's why I might take the same b&w negative successfully used for a 20X24 print, for example, and contact print it too. That why you too, Vaughn, break the "rules" and
make lovely carbon contacts from tiny 2-1/4 negatives. But masking is something I've always enjoyed.