Enlarged negatives from transpareny

Chris Gibbs (cpgibbs@ptialaska.net)
Mon, 10 Nov 1997 11:50:06 +0000

Hello All,

I have been following discussions on the list for a couple of months
now. The information received from its members has been first rate, and
the archives are invaluable!

Having now read three different manuscripts (Mr Burkholder/Fokos &Palmer
"many thanks to each" BTW) I'm left wondering is there another
easier/cheaper way to produce enlarged negatives?

The digital method appealed to me initially as my thoughts of shooting
only transparency (120mm Stock), digitizing said images then outputting
to an imagesetter seamed ideal! However, this process although
excellent in nature is *very* expensive (for your average starving
artist anyway). More importantly, in order to generate a large enough
grayscale file the RGB scan must be huge, my humble Mac simple cannot
cope!

Instead of going back to the old methods :-) and shooting a medium/large
format monochrome image in addition to the tranny I have a question.
"Does anyone out there produce enlarged negatives directly from a
transparency"? My thought (as a novice Alt.Photo person) is that the
results should be very good if working with a fine grain medium format
tranny and enlarging onto say 8x10" FP4+.

I may be (probably am) missing something here but given the advancement
in 120mm transparency film and panchromatic b&w film surely the results
*could* be comparable to the traditional *neg/enlaged pos/neg* method.
"Would the medium format tranny directly to 8x10" FP4+ offer more or
less control *dust/contrast/resolution* etc.

Looking forward to your input......

Respectfully,
Chris Gibbs
Eagle River, Alaska.