Kodak Linagraph Paper

I was experimenting with some stuff called Kodak Linagraph paper today. I really can't find much about it on the web, but it seems rather wacky...

Paper negatives

My favourite quick-and-cheerful method for testing new equipment, especially lenses, is to use paper instead of film in the camera. This can be done with any size camera - you need to cut photographic paper to size and perhaps tape it in place inside the camera. Of course this has to be done in the dark, but the advantage of paper is that everything can be done with an orange safelight, so there's no fiddling in the dark.

For large format cameras it's especially easy to load film holders with paper. You may need to be prepared to trim the paper slightly because (believe it or not) 4x5 film is smaller than 4x5 paper (that's the surprising bit) and film holders are designed for film not paper (that's less surprising).

Paper can be exposed like film. It is not sensitive to red light or to much green light much, but in daylight that's not much of a problem. Depending on the paper I expose mine at 2,3,4,6 ISO or higher in daylight. 3ISO is five stops slower than 100ISO. I take my light readings at 100ISO and calculate from there. There's a further advantage that exposures are typically a second or more, so shutters can be dispensed with in favour of the old manual method of using the lens cap as a shutter.

The other advantage is that it's easy to have trays of developer set up in the darkroom, so that (at least if you are shooting your tests in the back garden, which is what I do) each shot can be developed and inspected before the next is taken. Paper is also much cheaper than film.

For Ilford Multigrade paper, which is a little on the slow side but is one of the commonest kinds, I use ISO 3 as a starting point. Others are a bit faster.

After processing, the paper is washed and dried as usual and is scanned on a normal flat bed scanner. If your scanner is reasonable you should be able to get enough detail from even a 35mm negative. No special negative scanner is needed. Of course you will need to invert the tones - you might be able to do this in your scanning software, or any digital processing software will do this. (I use the Gimp.) Less obviously, the image you get will be a mirror image, so a "flip" transform (either left-right or top-bottom) may be helpful, but this is easy in software.

Linagraph direct print paper

I got a quantity of this stuff, which looked like it was worth a try. But it's not designed for normal printing. So on this occasion my paper-negative tests were testing the paper, not the lens. I chose a safe, dependable lens (which was in fact an enlarger lens, but quite good enough for the purpose), fitted it to the camera, loaded some of the paper into the holders and had a go.

A typical negative I got looked like this.

After letting the paper dry and then scanning it and processing it, this was the picture I got.

Pretty good really. There's a nice warm colour, due to my colour-inversion and the fact the paper is slightly cool. The paper appears to be sensitive to green, unlike normal papers, and is quite fast. (I exposed at 16ISO and developed slightly long at 2.5 minutes in PQ universal developer, 1+9.)

Conclusions

Other people may have found some of this paper, so perhaps my very early conclusions on it so far may be useful.

It is fast, at least one and perhaps two stops faster than normal paper. My sample gave a noticeable grey background, which is OK for negatives but not OK for prints. Next time I will try reducing the development time and increasing the exposure, hoping for better whites. Or a different developer might help.

The paper is very delicate when wet and scratches and other marks are very easy to make.

The instructions on the box say to use safelight filter 2, which is a red filter for fast orthochromatic films. Therefore a normal darkroom filter (which is what I used) may not be sufficiently safe. You should certainly experiment.

The pink colour of the emulsion is slightly offputting at first, but it does go when the paper is processed normally.

Solarisation

I thought it might be fun to try the paper in a completely different way, especially as I had no idea what it was specifically designed for.

The sun was bright so I pointed my camera towards it and set the shutter for a long exposure. (In fact, I used 2 seconds at f/11.) And shot.

My first attempt produced (unsurprisingly) a negative that was completely black. Rather than reducing the exposure I decided to reduce the development time, and to my delight, produced a negative in which the sun was perfectly white. After scanning, inverting colours and maximising the tones in the other areas (which are almost uniformly grey, but the scanner could find some slight differences) this is the image.

That's not a negative, but a positive. The sun is quite white on the negative. The other features (for example, a dark doorway to the bottom right) are dark/bright as expected for a positive - everything except the sun.

And it is not hi-fi my any means, and the scratches seem very easy to make on this paper, but this reversal of very bright objects is a lot of fun to do when the materials are right for it. The effect is known, and is usually called "solarisation", but isn't the same as the "Sabbatier effect" (also often called soloarisation, and perhaps something for a future post). Solarisation worked really well with this paper, and much better than conventional paper I tested it against. So this might be an interesting application. More experiments are obviously needed.

Gum Bichromate

If photography is art, the qualities of the media used in the final print are as much part of that art as the subject. In fact I would go further - the subject and whatever it is provided it is looked at freshly with an interesting eye is not important for "art". One does not have to take a photograph of a pretty girl or a cute puppy for it to be art: in such cases these cutsie subjects are more likely to be distracting from the purpose of the image than complementing it.

So other methods for making a photographic image on paper must be explored by any serious photographic artist. Or so my humble opinion goes. I am only at the beginning of this exploration, but I hope to share some of it here, and some details of the experiments I made.

The gum bichromate process appeals to me for a number of reasons: one uses real-art paper, and real-art paints (watercolours). The choice of colour is available in a bewildering range, and it is even possible to layer several colours on each other. The theory is that the dichromate chemical when exposed to ultraviolet light, hardens many natural and artificial gum or glue-like substances, and this can be used as the basis for making a print from a negative. An introduction to gum-bichromate is available at The Alternative Photography site and this site has much more than I can say here. However my personal experiences may be helpful.

The recipe

The recipes I read on the web were mostly of the sort "take a dollop of this and a small amount of that..." and were too imprecise for anything but experiment, not that there is anything wrong with that, but some precision is needed to help make the process more predictable.

I took some "half-pan" watercolours, student grade from an art shop, and chose one (for the first attempt, the black) and cut it into half. It makes a very thick gummy cube, rather difficult to spread without water, but I really don't want to add too much water as it is the reaction between the dichromate and the gum that is important. Ideally, the watercolour should go in a dedicated pestle-and-mortar. You might be able to improvise some alternative holder, or use paint from a tube which is easier to mix but less concentrated.

I dissolved 13g of potassium dichromate crystals in 100ml of de-ionised water. They don't dissolve very easily: what I did was put the crystals and water in a bottle, put the top on, then immersed the whole thing under the hot tap, shaking occasionally, until it had dissolved. See warnings on dichromate below.

I took 6ml of gum arabic solution (from a bottle supplied by Windsor and Newton, available in art shops) and mixed it and pounded it with the water colour. Gum arabic is from the acacia tree and is also available as powder - you could dissolve this in (very little very hot) water and use this instead. My notes say to use 30g in 90ml water, though I didn't test this.

In a darkened room - with definitely no daylight though some tungsten light should be OK - I mixed the watercolour and gum mixture with 6ml of the dichromate solution. This made a thick watercolour paint which just covered a sheet of A2 paper, using a good soft flat brush. The paper was stored in the dark to dry, and when dry cut into small pieces as required. I used medium quality watercolour paper. The textures in the paper will remain and add to the print, though very smooth paper will show more detail.

Printing out

Like most printing-out processes, the best source of light is the sun, but a UV light (from a fluorescent tube or mercury vapour lamp) is possible. The negative is place on top of and in contact with the paper, and the whole sandwich is held tightly under glass. There are special frames to hold all this together. I found that even on a rather dull overcast day, 2-5 minutes was sufficient exposure. In bright sun it will be less. This is much less exposure than is needed for printing out using silver-based emulsions.

Special printing-out frames are available to allow you to check the process as it happens. If you have them (I did) by all means use them, but in this process nothing appears to be happening and it is pointless checking anything. You just have to do a trial, develop it, and modify the time for the second attempt.

The UV light should have hardened the gum in certain areas of your paper, but as I said, at this stage nothing can be seen. To "develop" the picture you need to wash away the non-hardened gum revealing the white paper beneath. Run the paper gently under a stream of water from a tap for a minute of so. Then soak the paper image-side down in a tray of clean water for 5 minutes. Then change the water and repeat 2 times. I found that the paint needed some help to come away and I brushed the paper very lightly and evenly all over with the same soft flat brush I used for coating. When this works (and for me, it always worked, though some prints were better than others) it was wonderful to see how some paint comes away leaving the image.

After washing thoroughly (all of the orange dichromate colour should go) leave it to dry.

Warning

The gum and modern pigments are safe to use but dichromate is toxic and probably carcinogenic. When handling crystals or powder wear rubber gloves, eye protection and a face mask so there is no possibility of breathing in dust. When handling solution or prepared paper use rubber gloves. If you use containers to handle chemicals don't use them later on for food. If you think you may have accidentally touched something with chemicals wash in plenty of running water immediately.

From multiple exposures to slitscans

Here's a nice trick that will make the owners of a simple point-and-click roll-film camera proud.

These cameras usually have self-cocking shutters, which means the first stage of pressing the shutter release tensions the spring in the shutter, and only the very last bit lets the shutter go. (You can pride yourself on your wonderful shutter action. Most more expensive shutters work in two stages with a separate cocking lever and release lever that is much less convenient.)

And cheap roll film cameras rarely have fancy mechanisms to stop you clicking that shutter more than once on a single negative, like the expensive ones do. That makes these cameras really good to use.

The sort of cameras I am thinking of look like these:

They are essentially the point-and-shoot pocket cameras of the 1950s. Often they are very elegant and attractive. They are always interesting, and usually they out-perform a Holga or Diana. They are also usually much cheaper. (But a Holga or Diana would do if you have one of these. Or even a box brownie or something like that as long as it takes 120 film, rather than 620 film which isn't available, or 127 film which is difficult to get hold of.)

Multiple exposures

So all you do is click several times and take multiple exposures.

Either take two exposures in different places that you think will complement each other,

or try to hold the camera still (better still put it on a tripod, but sadly many of these kinds of camera don't come with a tripod thread) and take several pictures one after the other.

This blog is not going to be just a catalogue of cool effects though. It's also about how to make these cool effects cooler and better. So you are in control.

If you are doing multiple exposures there are two things to know.

• Your exposure values must change. So if you are using two exposures on the same film, the film will see twice the amount of light. Four exposures is four times the light. This means if you think ISO400 film would give you good exposures one particular day, double exposures on ISO200 film should be about right too. So would be a quadruple exposure on ISO100 film.
• The multiple exposures will tend to "muddy" the image. That means the various exposures will tend to even each other out to give a uniform grey. So: multiple exposures reduce contrast.

If you are in charge of all stages of the process you can do something about contrast. Push-processing (i.e. exposing film at high speed and increasing development, e.g. exposing a 100 film at 400 or a 400 film at 1600 and developing longer to compensate) increases contrast. Do this if you can. Or you can print your image on high contrast paper. Sadly both of these are beyond most people who send their film to labs: if you are one of these, expect to have to use a photoshop-equivalent to increase contrast on your scanned negatives.

Panning

Here's a variation of the same trick. Take a picture and then wind on the film and move the camera a little bit. Then take another picture and wind on the film a bit more and move the camera again. Carry on a dozen or maybe more times.

Such as here.

Or here.

(This set also had a light leak, which shows these are not unique to Holgas or Dianas either. More on this later too.)

If you are clever or lucky your panning might equal or nearly equal the movement of the film. (Hmmmm... which way to pan? it depends on which way your camera pulls film though. Don't forget the image on the film is upside down. Here's a puzzle for you. Which way should you pan your camera? The answer's easy if you can flip your brain into a mirror image and then turn it upside down.)

Adding a slit

Finally, here's a camera mod, rather than just a different way of using the camera. For this very easy mod, cut some black card and glue it inside the camera making a small vertical slit maybe 5mm wide.

Then the click-wind-and-pan action only takes single exposures, albeit very long thin exposures. (OK you'll have to learn how much to wind. Maybe they will overlap or maybe there will be gaps. That's part of the fun.) With some practice, and perhaps some creative cropping you'll get something nice.

A very thin slit with a camera that's panning is the principle of a slitscan. If we can make the panning and the film-winding smoother, and the slit thinner, we get a completely different way of taking a photograph with a normal camera. This will be taken up later too.