Last summer I was hanging around a professional printer's studio getting some test prints done and we started talking about film and alternative processes. After a while he says, Let me show you something. He went through his filing cabinets and after a while found what he was looking for. He pulled some slides from their protective plastic sleeves and began handing them to me. I held them up to the light of the window and I experienced this rare sense of exultation. I had never seen anything like it. They were portraits. Black & white positive slides of portraits.
I'm not sure why they had such an effect on me. Maybe because I had never seen b&w slides before. But there was something about their very nature that struck me -- their tonal quality, their luminescence. He explained there had been a kit to make them...
A couple months ago I was listening to the Classic Camera Revival podcast out of Toronto and they began talking about black & white slide processing, about this company in Iowa --
http://www.dr5.com/blackandwhiteslide/filmreviewdev1.html -- that does it using a wide variety of regular b&w negative film, and how blown away they were by the results. They also talked about home methods, but they're rather dangerous in that they involve sulfuric acid. From wiki:
Black-and-white transparencies can be made directly with some modern black-and-white films, which normally yield negatives. The negative image is developed but not fixed. The negative image is removed by bleaching with a solution of potassium permanganate or potassium dichromate in dilute sulfuric acid, which is removed by washing and a clearing bath containing sodium metabisulfite or potassium metabisulfite. The remaining silver halide salts are re-exposed to light, developed and fixed, and the film is washed and dried.I decided to give it a shot. My grandson and daughter, HP5 @ ISO 800, Zeiss Jena Biotar 58mm / Pentax SV.
These are very different from the type of b&w I normally do. I generally do very contrasty stuff. I learned b&w in the context of the zone system and I live in zones 1-5 and 9-10, skipping over those silvery light grays of zones 6-8. But these have those grays, without skimping on the lower tones. They have a pretty complete tonal range and somehow (maybe through confirmation bias) they retain much of the luminescence of the experience of viewing the images as slides, to my eyes.
Next up are some cityscapes with Technical Pan.
