A friend and I plan to print negative prints from negative film. We have been told that you take a good print to begin with and lay it face down on another piece of paper, and the expose it for a really long time. Is this really what you do and if so how long is really long a minute, two , three??? We plan to try this week sometime. If we haven't any more assignments due. Any tips for this project? What would qualify as a good print? Just one that looks cool as a negative, or one with lots of contrast?? Thanks!

-- martha goldsmith (oscar@unidial.com), October 10, 1999

Answers

You are asking about two different things, are you printing negative to negative, or making a contact print with a paper negative? Pat

-- pat j. krentz (krentz@cci-29palms.com), October 10, 1999.

????

-- Lot (lotw@wxs.nl), October 10, 1999.

Martha,

You can do this several ways, depending on the effect you want. If you have a good print, you can contact print it with another piece of photo paper. Do a test strip just like when making a print to see the effect and how long the exposure should be. It shouldn't be "a really long time". More likely a factor of 2-5x your regular printing time. You can also do it by making a contact print of the original negative on a piece of film, then print that in the normal fashion. Finally, you could shoot on B&W slide film, which gives a positive image, then print that, resulting in a negative image. Of course, you could just scan it, then hit the "reverse" button in any image processing program for instant gratification!

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), October 10, 1999.

Or you can print the negative onto the paper and then develop it through a reversal process. The same way you can make B&W positives from B&W slides. But if you start with a B&W negative, you end up with a negative print.

The RIT site has information on reversal processing of B&W paper.

-- Terry Carraway (TCarraway@compuserve.com), October 12, 1999.