Making black, making white

There are many things to like about carbon transfer printing (and at least as many to dislike about it…). One of them is that essentially, you’re making the black and the white separately and then marry them when making the actual transfer. The black is the tissue, the white is the final support. Combined, they make for a continuous tone image. Pretty neat if you consider that they start out as pure black and pure white!

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PVC development tubes for sheet film

Warning: again a total lack of originality on my part. The upshot is that apparently I don’t suffer too badly from the not invented here syndrome because I proudly stole reproduced this idea from Tim Layton whom in turn was inspired by Phil Davis and his “Beyond The Zone System” approach. The whole idea is essentially just a hollow tube with two end caps in which you put a single sheet of film, fill ‘er up with developer and agitate in whichever way you fancy. This could be a fancy water bath agitator like in the official BTZS approach, or, as in my case, simply turning the tube over and over like a regular daylight tank, or rolling it on a counter top.

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Beginner’s luck

Well, not an appropriate title, that’s a good start… this post is about carbon transfer printing, which is something I did quite a bit of a few years ago. I don’t think I even had a large format camera back then, so I just used digital negatives instead. And grew very tired of it, very quickly. Well, after making a couple of hundreds of prints (mind-numbingly boring calibration charts as well), that is.

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