Negative positive Paper negative printing by Andrew Sanderson, from Ag16
Technique Choose a contact sheet from your files, make it one with a few frames on one subject. If you have, say, 4 frames shot on the same scene, all very similar then this is ideal. • Set up your enlarger as you would to make a contact sheet. • Place a piece of paper on the baseboard (10x8in). • Place existing contact sheet face down on unexposed paper. • Hold down with heavy glass and expose (time already determined by a test strip of course). • Process, wash, dry. • These are your paper negatives, cut the sheet into strips the same size as your original contacted film. • Take the strip with the 4 similar frames and on the back of the paper, do nothing with frame 1, add a little pencil work to frame 2, add twice as much density to frame 3, and really overdo it on frame 4. ( a 6B pencil is best). • Place the paper stripunder the enlarger. These are test prints and your exposures are going to be rather a lot longer than from film negs, so for starters the enlarger wants to be low down on the column to give you more light, you can go for bigger later! • Do a test strip, I suggest exposures in the region of 4 times your usual. • While you are at it, you may as well move the neg strip along and test for the others too, (don’t forget to mark on the back which test is for frame 1, frame 2 etc.). • After testing make your 4 prints and observe the difference in exposure times and how the pencil work effects the final image. • You might like to repeat this sequence having first altered the tones in the high light areas of your original contact sheet by using pencil on the back in the same way. Have fun.
