Contact Printing - Where to Start?

[GhoSStrider]

Hello all,

I recently purchased a Green Monster that will be arriving this week. The goal is to make as beautiful contact prints as possible. I'm just wondering where to start. Is it worth it to jump straight into Lodima/Amidol? Is Fomalux 111 a better start point? Should I start with traditional enlarging paper?

I've had a little darkroom experience with 4x5, but not a lot. I'm quite eager to get going on the contact prints and see what I can do, though!

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Chris

[Richard K.]

No harm in practising with (or even settling on) the Fomalux; it is a fine paper. As far as Amidol/Azo etc. goes, sure practise that too; it may be a look you like. A lot of folk like the look of Ansco 130 with the Azo/Lodima too. YOU have to decide what you like. I even like the look iof Ilford WT paper! I guess other than experimenting and deciding on a silver paper, you should decide if you would be interested in an alternate process, but I warn you, a well-made Platinum print will smite you and you will be hooked. What format Green Monster, BTW?

Thanks for that bit of Ed Abbey quote, one of my favourites (but it should be amazing not spectacular ), and it may apply to your upcoming journey! Just in case there are people that haven't read the entire benediction before, please allow me to quote it in full:

"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."

[Jay DeFehr]

Chris,

One of my dearest friends shares your name; he's Christopher Daniel, known to many simply as CD May. If your green monster is the one that recently sold on ebay, congratulations! What a beauty! I hope it turns out to be the magnesium model. I nearly bid, but in the end decided to keep my Deardorff. It was far from an easy decision, and I still suffer tinges of regret.

Contact printing begins with the choice of paper, as you know, or process, as Richard added. All of the papers mentioned are good choices, in general, but it's impossible to guess which one, or which process will suit you best, and I think Abbey's quote is serendipitous here. None can say where you'll arrive by your journey of discovery, and where you begin matters less than beginning. Good light and good luck!

[Michael Kadillak]

Congrats on the first step. You are likely going to need to print with all of the papers you listed to get a feel for what works for you so start with the least expensive and work your way up. Do you have a place to process your films and print?

I am in Aurora and would be more than happy to share my experiences making 8x10 and larger Azo/Lodima contact prints.

[John Kasaian]

You may prefer the materials that you've got on hand. Experiment with other materials later on and compare.

[GhoSStrider]

Richard - Thank you for the information and the correction on the quote. I added that as my sig line from memory and am actually pretty pleased that that was my only error! Platinum is one of the alternative processes I want to explore someday, but for now I just want to get my feet wet with traditional prints.

Jay - That Green Monster must have been watched by a lot of folks! (I've been asked a couple other places if that was the one I got). No, mine is coming from the Nevada desert. ;-)

Michael - I was doing my 4x5 stuff at the Denver Darkroom, but that wasn't working too well for me. I'm working on establishing a very, very small dark room in my house. That was actually the impetus for going to 8x10. I couldn't fit my 4x5 enlarger into my tiny space, so going to 8x10 where I could do contact prints seemed to make sense. I still get the LF experience and can do so in my home when the mood strikes.

At a very minimum, I would love to see some of your Azo/Lodima contact prints and see what they look like in person. I'd be happy to buy you a coffee/beer/other beverage of your choice some evening if you'd like. :-)

John - I don't have too much left from my 4x5 stuff, and what I have is getting a bit dated. I was going to be placing an order for film/paper/developer/etc. soon, hence my curiosity on whether I should just jump in, or do it in steps.

[Jay DeFehr]

Chris,

I have Azo, Foma 111, and a wide variety of enlarging papers in my darkroom, meaning I haven't standardized on a single paper, not even a single contact speed paper, and I don't expect to. For me, having a variety of printing options is important. There is something to be said for concentrating one's attention on a single paper or process, too, and your space constraints seem to favor that approach. I'm moving into an apartment soon, and will be challenged (again) by all the commensurate spacial constraints. Where there's a will, there's a way!

[Ralph Miyashiro]

Hi Chris,
I'm speaking from very little experience, but it might be useful. I also have no room for an enlarger, so it's contacts in my "darkened room" with the light bulb (15 watt) method. I'm using the Foma RC stuff(fiber wasn't available when I started) and it's working for me, being new to LF it's a cheap way to get a feel for printing, easy to use and washes in a flash. I got some inexpensive enlarging paper to do medium format contact sheets and that stuff is super fast in comparison (3 sec. as opposed to a minute) to the Foma. So the enlarging paper might be pretty tough to control.

Ralph

[Scott Walker]

I am not a fan of contact printing and I was hoping that some of the issues I have had would come up here and maybe even be resolved but they didn't. So I will put them out and hopefully some can be resolved.
The first is that the negative takes a whole lot of abuse in the contact printing process compared to enlarging.
Second is dust, I live in a rather dry climate and dust and static kind of go hand in hand here and no matter how carefull you are you will have to spot prints. the problem with contact printing is that the process of adding and removing paper from the contact print setup creates static and attracts dust. On an enlargement I normally have to spot 2 or 3 places per print and they are all in the same place so you just print 3 or 4 extras and perfect your spotting before working on the good prints. With contact printing I seem to get 6 to 10 per print and they are random, virtually never in the same place on two prints so spotting takes a huge amount of time because you have to scan every print for dust spots and then repair them at a much slower pace in order to not over correct. I do have a good air filtration system in my darkroom.
Third is them pesky newton rings, although not visible without magnification I have never been able to make a contact print without a few showing up when I go to spot the print, and yes I use the expensive glass that supposedly cures this problem.

[John Bowen]

Scott,
Get yourself a vacuum easel. It eliminates the glass and two surfaces to attract dust. I've found using a vacuum easel to be a real time saver in the darkroom. I have a 16x20 easel and use the cardboard that kodak puts in with film to mask off the print. I can't remember the last time I had to spot a contact print.

Good luck