Topic: Enlarger for a reverse hybrid process and or film negs

[LT]

http://fojo.me/

Thoughts? (Ps it takes film as well)

[jojonas~]

I think it's a grand idea to give another way into making prints. I've followed them since the crowdfunding was active and pushed to make their enlarger able to take other enlarger lenses too.

it looks quite different from the initial design and seems pretty fancy.

heck, the square format cut paper made by ilford that goes along with it is enough to make me excited

[LT]

I think it is a great idea too Jonas. I can see an iPad 4x5/ 5x7 neg version in the offing too? maybe.

I like the idea of the smartphone as light source rather than as negative source, but it is cool that you can do both.

the success will lie in the intricacies and features of the app. I can see different colour projection of contrast control, programmable burn and dodge sequences, f-stop timing .... the options are broad!

I hope it takes off.

[zapsnaps]

Thoughts? What's with the wretched piano?

I think that this is really cool. I'd like to buy the safe light as a stand-alone purchase, it's so funky.

Anything which gets Digital Youth using a darkroom (no matter how limited it's function in the eyes of experienced FWs) has got to be a good thing for paper & chem manufacturers. People may even have so much fun that they decide to ditch the phone and pick up an old fashioned camera, possibly (probably?) for the first time in their lives.

Perhaps the very limitations of the process will make it Lomo-cool. In fact, I bet the Lomo folk wish they had come up with the idea themselves.

[jojonas~]

the success will lie in the intricacies and features of the app. I can see different colour projection of contrast control, programmable burn and dodge sequences, f-stop timing .... the options are broad!

I hope it takes off.

genious! heck, that'd open up many possibilities. marking up different parts of the lightsource with different contrast and maybe light strength too so you could get it all done in one exposure.

[LT]

marking up different parts of the lightsource with different contrast and maybe light strength too so you could get it all done in one exposure.

Double genius! would be difficult with a negative ... but not impossible.

[Francois]

I must admit that the design of the thing does look pretty darn sweet.
So far, all I can say is why not? I wonder what the enlargements will look like?

[John Robison]

I like the concept. That said I just have to limit spending on photo related gear. Film and paper are already expensive enough for my budget. I have a modest Durst 301 that was free and although it can only do 35mm I think that will be fine. I limit my prints to 6X9 inches on 8X10 paper for 35mm and 6X8 inches on 8X10 paper for my half frame Pen F camera. I do have larger format with a TLR and a couple of folders but if I want a print from those negs I just go to the *unmentionable* hybrid method. 

[Francois]

Though looking at this thing, it should be fairly easy to replicate.
You don't need to build the light box, so that step is eliminated.
Lens is most probably a 150mm since it will cover a 4x5 piece of film. That's big enough for most smartphones.
Bellows can be replaced by either sliding boxes with a stop or sliding tubes with a simple slit cut in one of them like I did for my heavy metal lens.
Support is just a piece of wood attached to the baseboard with a piece of angle iron.

It could also be made with a large-ish pinhole if you don't have all the required parts...

[LT]

The lens that comes with it is a 75mm seagull piece o crap. I suppose it runs on the basis that the images will be around 6x6 on the screen. Any standard thread can be used though I think.

[Francois]

Well... the seagull lens might not be the hottest thing in the world but when you consider that you will essentially be looking at a phone screen with a magnifier, it might not be such a bad thing in the end...

[Bryan]

One problem I see with this is the pixels showing on the enlargement.  I had the same problem using my iPad as a light table to scan negatives.  My solution was to place a translucent white sheet of plastic between the negative and the iPad.  It works great, that's how all my black and white photos are scanned.  If you're trying to make an enlargement from a picture on your phone the pixels will be enlarged with it.

[Jack Johnson]

The lens that comes with it is a 75mm seagull piece o crap. I suppose it runs on the basis that the images will be around 6x6 on the screen. Any standard thread can be used though I think.

Hmm. Think that lens would work on a Great Wall (or vice versa)?

[Indofunk]

Thoughts? What's with the wretched piano?

This was my initial thought too!

[jojonas~]

The lens that comes with it is a 75mm seagull piece o crap. I suppose it runs on the basis that the images will be around 6x6 on the screen. Any standard thread can be used though I think.

yeah, the thing has a M39 lens mount and you can buy just the enlarger without lens and the other accessories. hm, when they started out it was gonna come with just a plastic lens so I guess the seagull is an upgrade from that.
provided the limit on enlargements you can do with the machine I suppose the seagull is good enough.

how big is a screen on a regular iphone nowadays? I thought I read that it could take up to 6x9 negs with the right lens.

[Francois]

I have no idea, but this thing has sparked my curiosity.
When I get a bit of time, I'm going to try and enlarge an image from my Samsung ACE IIx by simply putting it in my Omega DII enlarger and see how it goes...

[Bryan]

I haven't used an enlarger in decades but wouldn't the phone be very dim compared to the light on an enlarger?  Would this require a very long exposure when making an enlargement?  I'll be interested to see what you get from it Francois.

[Francois]

Well, I did a short test between dinner and an appointment. And the results were not as I expected... I just love the unexpected.

First, since I had no software to control the enlargement process, I did it the long way. So I ended up taking a picture I took with my phone, bring it into photoshop where I converted it to B&W using the Black & White feature in Photoshop CS3. I tweaked the tones until it looked good on my screen and then flipped the image right to left and converted to negative before re-saving all this on the phone's card.

Then came the phone's setup. I had to crank the brightness all the way to 11, remove the power saving mode, turn off auto-rotation which decided to make the image small and set the screen banking mode to 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds.

I used Android's Photos app to load my negative.

The enlarger I used is an Omega DII 4x5 with a Schneider 135mm lens. I just put my phone on the negative holder to put it in the enlarger making sure not to drop the condensers on it.

Light wise, the amount of it was definitely a surprise. I was expecting something much more dim, though I had to expose it wide open at f/4.5 just to get reasonable exposure times for my 5x7 print.

Another thing that was quite a surprise is how hard it was to actually get a sense of how much light output it gave. I was expecting to get a 42 second exposure but I really overcooked the first print. So I subtracted one stop and it gave me this exposure. This is probably due to the fact that the screen displays a grid pattern that makes it hard to evaluate.

Then, there's the tell tale grid pattern of the screen that gets enlarged big time. When I used the focusing scope, I could see the individual pixels quite clearly.

I also got a surprise when it came to the contrast of the print. My original was somewhat contrasty but this was all gone on the print. I think I should blame the blueish-ness of the screen for that. It seems that it exposes mostly on the soft (grade 0-2 possibly) emulsion layer of my RC paper... I had to play with the levels to get the print to look good in the scan.

For timing the exposure, I just listened to the ticking of the clock and blocked the light with my hand... very high tech as you can see.

So all in all, it's all going to come down to the software they package with their creation. It's also going to have a quite limited enlarging size.

Here are some samples of the original, the reproduction and a close-up of the enlargement.

[Bryan]

There's the pixels.   I wonder if they can do something with the software to turn the pixels into grain?

[Francois]

I really doubt it since the pixels are simply there.
But they could add some anti reflection glass in the system to blur it all a bit so that the pixels are not as visible.

[Kayos]

How about taking the back off your phone and using the enlargers light source?

[Francois]

Wouldn't work for a few reasons.
First, the pattern is in the screen itself... it's the way the colors are displayed.
Second, my screen is LED so it isn't transparent at all.
Third, all the electronics are hidden behind the screen.
Fourth, even if I used a real projector I would be seeing the spots... it's the way they work.


There's no escaping the pixelation. Screens are designed for direct viewing based on the eye's resolution of 300 DPI at normal viewing distance. When you enlarge them, you reduce the resolution quite rapidly so that you loose the softness of the scale. The image becomes more like a bad newspaper print than anything else. I still have the print on my desk and it's quite unpleasant to look at... strangely it strains your eyes just looking at it, a bit like having the wrong prescription in your glasses.... very weird and totally unexpected.

[mickld]

I ordered one way back when it was offered on Indiegogo. That was a long time ago, and I'm still waiting. Their last update promised to ship the enlarger by the end of this month. Assuming their updates have been true, they have suffered many set backs and overcome many, many problems to get the product produced. So I do feel sorry for them.

I had tried and failed at contact printing with an iPad when I started out in the darkroom, and this looked like a good way to turn my crappy Hipstamatic snaps into art. Printing the pixels hadn't occurred to me until some time after ordering it. So Francois' experiments don't bode well.

But - you will be the first to know how it turns out when (if) it arrives.

[LT]

it would still be okay for using the iPad/ phone as a light source to print negs though. Especially with the phone/tablet placed a distance above the neg, and some kind of diffusion between the light source and the neg.  It think all is not lost, and neither is Kayos's humour

[Skorj]

We theorized about a Digital Day Lab ages ago, and someone has my Polaroid video camera to print machine somewhere... I even forget what it was called! Worked well though. Pixels too were its limitation, and as others commented as they are the source of the light they are also the source of the 'digital grain'... Skj.

[Francois]

The device could be "salvaged" in a sense by using some anti réflexion glass from a framing shop. Not thé super extensive muséum type but the one with a slightly pebbled surface. My guess it that it should offer just enough distortion to get the pixels relatively blended while maintaining enough sharpness for the image to stay recognizeable. Though with a seriously impressionistic look. But at least it wouldn't make the enlarged pixels so hard to look at.

My guess is that the enlargement ratio would change the look a lot on this device...