Seeking Ideas For Simple 8x10 Contact Printing Solution

[Jim Noel]

Light is as simple as what Edward Weston Used - an incandescent bulb mounted at the end of a rod secured through a hole in a piece of wood wotha thumbscrew. Use toilet tissue to reduce light as needed.

[Doremus Scudder]

I second the idea of using an enlarger head as a light source. It could be a small dichro head (35 or 67). It wouldn't even need a column, just some way to hang it from the ceiling temporarily when in use. Then you would have built in filtration and, by adding equal amounts of yellow and magenta to whatever filtration you have, a simple way to add effective neutral density. Heck, I used to drag a Beseler 23C in and out of my 4x8' bathroom and printed both black-and-white and Cibachromes that way. I had a small sink on legs with suction cups that fit exactly over the bathtub and used the shower pipe sans nozzle for a hose connection for water. A drain hose just hung in the tub. You could do something like that easily.

I've done the hanging bare bulb and dimmer too. Worked just fine, but I didn't use it for VC paper. A dichro head instead of bare bulb seems an elegant solution to me.

Best,

Doremus

[LFLarry]

Thanks to everyone for your ideas and input.

I just got back from Home Depot with a pile of stuff that I thought might be useful.

I am going to work on building and testing my solution this coming week.

[Red]

This is a good question. I recently went through a similar process and here is what I decided on.

For enlarging paper, I use Ilford MG IV Fiber paper, I got a 15W incandescent night light with a regular base on it and got a shop light from Home Depot. I bought a lamp dimmer and plugged that into my timer so I could control the light. I got one of those silver shop light reflectors and hung that from a hook I put in the bathroom ceiling. On that lamp housing, I made a way to slide in the 6x6 Ilford VC filters. Works really well and when I need to do a little dodging and burning, I just dial back the intensity of the light.

For silver chloride paper, I use a 100W flood light with the same dimmer and timer. I just change out the light source from the 15W to the 100W and everything else stays the same.

If you can't screw anything into the ceiling, then think of some options to either clamp the light to or whatever. Only you will know this based on your bathroom setup and personal preferences.


Good luck!

We are getting ready to move in a couple weeks to a smaller house and my space for making enlargements is going away and so I am going back to making 8x10 contact prints.

Seeking some simple ideas on how to make a DIY type contact printing setup that I can use in my guest bathroom and then put away when not using it.

I already have a good contact printing frame, so all I really need to figure out is the light source (type of light, watts, distance from printing frame), how to use variable contrast filters under the light source.

I am sure whatever I come up with won't be as good as the collective group here, so I am really looking forward to hearing your idea.


Thanks!

[John Berry]

Be sure to check output with light meter. Using a frosted floodlight for azo, I went through 6 bulbs to get less than 1/4 stop center to edge on 8x10 from 5 ft away. They aren't concerned about centering filament needed our purposes.