Saturday, July 04, 2026

Another Paper Negative

  I have made images of these two howitzers in Albuquerque's Plaza Vieja with several of my old cameras.  This picture is from the Bob Eggers pinhole camera loaded with enlarging paper.  The pinhole is the sharpest I have ever come across.  

Unfortunately, I can't seem to adapt my vision to the ultra-wide view produced by the short distance from the pinhole to the film plane, so I have had to crop the image a bit to get closer to what I was intending.  I may go back with my last film holder to see if I can do better with the framing.

The exposure of the paper in the. camera was. 1.5 minutes.  Processing was in HC-110b.  

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While. watching the weekly episode of New Mexico In Focus on Youtube I noticed over in the right column of the screen that there was a video about paper negatives using an old Kodak folding camera.  Of course, I had to watch it.

The presenter, Borut Peterlin, is an entertaining guy who seems to be quite a competent photographer.  He starts out with some useful information about what kind of enlarging paper he likes and points out that film developer performs better in making paper negatives because paper developer tends to produce images that are too contrasty.

Much of the rest of the presentation was rather general, providing information applicable to standard photography techniques rather than specifically to paper.  I suppose that is useful to someone who has not done much actual darkroom work.  For those with more experience, if you know what a good negative or positive looks like there will be little problem in recognizing those desirable qualities in paper negatives,  including appropriate contrast and good detail in both shadows and highlights.

One  important factor which was omitted in the presentation. was the brief pre-flashing of the paper which seems a pretty standard step by most paper negative producers. 

Peterlin's demonstration used a camera with a lens rather than a pinhole.  That meant that he had a lot more latitude in the kind of scenes that he could easily shoot.  His full-sun shots could be accomplished with an exposure of a couple of seconds, which meant that open shade shots would be possible with around a ten to twenty second exposure.  Shooting with a pinhole on paper under those conditions requires thirty to sixty times more exposure. 

Peterlin "scanned" his. paper negatives by hand-holding a digital camera and illuminating the negative with an. overhead light, the same as me.  His end results were quite comparable  to results one would get from shooting on film.