In February 2007 I took a workshop with Ray Bidegain and Patrick Kolb of the Contact Printers Guild. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was inspired by Ann Quinn’s small flower prints, and pulled out a stack of found negatives.
There’s something about bicycles for me, so I chose the negative of the couple on the tandem. As you can see, it had some inconsistency with the density on one side (it was also backward, oops — I’ve reconciled that here):
Enter the Digital Negative. A lot of people tend to look down their nose at this relatively recent phenomenon. Whatever. Before I had access to a large format camera, this was my only option for any sort of contact printing, so I went to the school of hard knocks and figured it out, with some help from Dan Burkholder’s book in 2003. I thought the above negative was too good to waste, so I scanned it and did some quick repair, enlarged it and printed it at 8×10:
Study for Tandem, 2006
Digital Negative: Pictorico OHP, Epson 7800 K3 + Photo Black
Paper: Bergger (very nice paper)
(18)1:1.5% 100LU
I’ve called it a “study” because I was in a hurry and didn’t correct some things, like the fingerprint which has now grown to global proportions on the window in front of the man’s chest. There is also damage to the emulsion over the man’s hand. I don’t plan on enhancing any part of the photo, simply fixing damage that occurred after exposure of the original film.
