Agfacontour film?

[Cold Snail]

I have recently been given a few old boxes of film, but am intersted in the two sealed boxes of Agfacontour Orthochromatic safety film in the batch.
I understand this film ceased production back in the late 70's/early 80's.

Has anybody used this film before?

[Andreas]

Agfacontour was a sandwich consisting of a positive and a negative high-contrast film. If you photographed with it a grey scale, the beginning and the end of the scale would be full density, leaving only a narrow transparent strip. Changing the exposure moved the strip right or the left, you could change its width by filtering or processing (I don't remember which). Using registrations pins, you could generate several selective films from a half-tone film. The usual procedure was then to cumulatively contact-print an Ektachrome using colored light sources. The process was used in scientific photography to create false colors from a half-tone B&W film. It was fun, but complex, lengthy and expensive. And used very toxic chemicals. With a digital darkroom it's a 5 minutes job.

[Cold Snail]

Thank you Andreas.

[daniellez]

Hi Paul,

Yes, this thread is from 2006. Did you end up using the film?
I'd like to buy some Agfacontour if you still have it!

[francisn]

Having used Agfacontour many years ago I was intrigued to catch up on it.

I first came across feh film when I was at college in 1970 (Polytechnic of Central London) where we had some free samples to play around with.

It was fun and gave some nice results but I thought no more about it.

From 1971 - 74 I worked for the photographer Brian Duffy. In 1973 we shot photos of David Bowie for the album cover of Aladdin Sane (the one with the flash across his face). The rear of the cover, with the credits, we made using Agfacontour. It was either a second or third generation Agfacontour copy - can't remember - with the bits we didn't want masked with liquid opaque. One used varying degrees of yellow filtration to narrow or widen the equidensity so it did take a lot of getting what was wanted (in fact the assistant I working with got the sack because our boss thought it was taking too long!)

Nowadays it take a few minutes in Photoshop. In those days it was a lot of work.

Here's a link I found http://www.5years.com/aladdin.htm

[Jim Andrada]

I used to use it - great stuff! It was very tricky to get exactly the effect you were after when using it "artistically" rather than scientifically. I used it to extract density ranges from a B&W negative and then reprinted onto lith film and from lith film to Ulano Blue photo silk screen material.