Direct camera exposure on Ilfochrome

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Has anyone tried exposing via a camera directly onto Ilfochrome paper. In order to do this you would use a very large format camera (8x10 or greater) and a custom made 'film' back to hold the Ilfochrome paper.

You would be producing strictly one off images, but what would the quality be like? Would it be better than using a slide file. I'm just contemplating this as something to much around with.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Regards, Phil.

-- Philip Caithness (pcnexus@ozemail.com.au), March 14, 2001

Answers

Isn't color paper for tungsten light? Unless I am mistaken, you would need a color correction filter for daylight (85B?)

-- Åke Vinberg (ake@vinberg.nu), March 14, 2001.

Phil:

Why would you need a custom made back? Why not just use a standard 8x10 film holder? You might have to trim the paper size a little bit, but you might not.

You definitely would have to make color corrections as mentioned above. An 85 series filter would be a good place to start, but some additional fine tuning of the color balance would probably be necessary. The Ilfochrome would have a very slow "film speed rating" so there would probably be fairly long exposure times that could result in some color shifts that you would have to correct for with CC filters. A little experimentation should take care of that.

The image you get will be reversed left to right, but that would be correctable by photographing a mirror image of the scene.

-- Ken Burns (kenburns@twave.net), March 14, 2001.


Phil,

Another issue is that, unlike film, the color balance in each packet of paper is slightly different. Before I went to a digital darkroom it used to take me 4 or 5 sheets to get the color calibrated each time I opened a fresh pack of paper.

-harry

-- Harry Pluta (hspluta@msn.com), March 14, 2001.


I suspect that the contrast and colour saturation would be too low to be useful.
Slide film has a mid-tone gamma of 2, and Ilfochrome is made to reproduce this exaggerated contrast, as well as being balanced for tungsten. The HC version might work.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 14, 2001.

I've made pinhole camera images using ciba (ilfo) chrome in the past and got some fun results. I added the 85 blue filtration as was mentioned to get the stuff close to daylight balance, and my exposures were as one would expect very long. 60 min + as i recall. as far as being better than trans film, I would say no, but if you are interested in a unique look, and want to have fun, then yes. The image will be reversed too, like a d-type or tin type. signs will read backwards, etc.

-- Erik Gould (egould@risd.edu), March 14, 2001.


Hasn't Willie Anne Wright been doing this a good long while?

http://www.pinhole.com/exhibits/southland/statement.php3

-- Sean yates (yatescats@yahoo.com), March 14, 2001.


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