Last night was another extremely fun and reasonably successful session in my darkroom. Though my main goal was to test out my Speed-EZ 5×7 easel, I ended up doing some contact printing of some of my 4×5 negatives. I figured out it’s much easier to simply cut down a 5×7 sheet to 4×5 with 3 test strips. That worked out rather well and think I may do more of this, to the point I’m 3D printing some test designs to see if I can make it a bit easier to align the print and negative.
Anyways on of the prints was of my turntable setup playing a record. Since I had scanned the negative, I thought I would see what the results of scanning the resulting print might be and here they are:
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At these resolution, there isn’t really a tangible different apart from contrast and cropping. The full resolutions show that the print may actually be a little noisier when scanned on my flatbed than the negative was, though I need to re-scan the negative since it was before I switched my workflow over to Silverfast. A 4×5 contact print I don’t suspect really gives the 4×5 negative as much justice compared to an enlarger. I don’t have a 4×5 enlarger, at least not yet, so if I want to wet print my 4×5 negatives, this is the best I got. And while the scan doesn’t look super sharp, in person it looks quite lovely!