How to make High Contrast Title Slides and Low Contrast Pictorial Slides. The high contrast part is "Dan Anderson's" protocol, based on Carmen Rayner's protocol. (Low Contrast part is less proof-read than the High Contrast part) HIGH CONTRAST TITLE SLIDES What you need to take to the Bencher M2 copy stand: Camera: Some kind of Nikon, with a "Micro-Nikkor" 55mm f/2.8 lens. Use a cable release. Set the cable for B or T mode, according to taste. A rubber band or plasticene for the lens. Film: roll enough Kodak Precision Line film LPD4 + at least 4 more frames. Timer: It's cumbersome to start it and stop it, so just start it. Originals: The things to be photographed should be black on white, as large as possible on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. Taking the pictures: Attach a black mask to the camera's lens, attach the camera to the copy stand. Set the aperture half-way between f/5.6 and f/8. Set the camera's shutter speed to B. Turn off the room lights. The focus has to be perfect!!! Think about it for a while; use the magnifier. Use a rubber band or plasticene on the lens barrel to hold the focus. When everything is ready, turn up the lamps to HIGH. The exposure has been 5 seconds (Maybe 4 sec will work). If the original is very small, either photocopy to enlarge it, or extend the exposure to 6 or 7 sec. If the original has very fine lines or tiny dots, use 3.5 sec. Processing: (I will not repeat all the details in the introductory books). The minimum volumes to use are imprinted on the bottom of the processing tank. Developer: Kodak D19, undiluted. Developer must be clear to very pale brown. It works but not very well when it's brown. Soak for 5 minutes, with 5 seconds agitation every 30 seconds. Stop bath: 3 to 5% acetic acid, or Kodak Indicator Stop Bath. The indicator kind has to be yellow after stopping, or else it didn't stop. Soak for at least 30 sec. with constant agitation. Fixer: Kodak Rapid Fix with hardener. Use the film strength recipe (see below). Soak for at least 4 minutes, with occasional agitation. The fixer stains clothing, and the hardener can make holes in cotton. Wash: Do a preliminary wash with tap water to get off the bulk fixer. Then, for the diffusive part of the wash, connect tubing to the tank and do a flow-through wash with house deionized water for 15-20min. Photo-Flo: Dump out the water from the tank. Pour in a 500x dilution of Kodak Photo-Flo200 in HPLC grade water. Let it soak long enough to walk over to the clothesline to hang it up. Drying: The upper film clip should be dry before clipping the film. The lower film clip straightens the film. Let the film air dry, undisturbed, at least an hour or so. Fixer recipe: Mix on a magnetic stirrer, in a graduated cylinder, in the order shown here: Final Volume 300ml 600ml Water 150ml 300ml (house deionized) Solution A 75ml 150ml Solution B 8.2ml 16.4ml (add solution B very slowly) More water to final volume Details: (this is terse. there are entire books of details) The text should be as large as possible on the film. Although the mathematical resolution increases only linearly with image size, the number of rods and cones we viewers use to read the text increases as the square of the image size. So fill out the film. The exception is that if there are very few words (two names for instance), they will look rediculous when contrasted with busier slides. A familiar example of this is the credits of a movie. The focus has to be perfect. Out of focus pictures on high contrast film are blank, not fuzzy, because the bright part of the image hangs over the black part; when the film sees photons, it goes white. Nikon company policy is that their lenses shall focus quickly. The designers don't seem to care that their lenses do not stay in focus. The drifting focus is made worse by the weight of the black aluminum mask. You should therefore put a rubber band or plasticene on the side of the lens barrel, to immobilize the focus mechanism. Unwanted black dots should be scraped off photocopies and laser printer output with an Exacto knife. Large black regions from laser printers are not really black. They should be colored in with a black felt pen. Also, lines sometimes fade out in photocopies. Faint lines should be inked in, otherwise, they might not register on the film. Laser printer gray is actually black on white, so it photographs well. During photography, turn off the room lights. Cover the front of the camera with a black mask to prevent the camera from seeing its own reflection. The D19 developer recipe is printed on the developer package. Do not attempt to scale the recipe down! The dry chemicals are not mixed, and therefore the D19 formulation is not achieved until the entire package contents are dissolved. After pouring the required volume of D19 into a graduated cylinder, I blow nitrogen into the D19 bottle to minimize its exposure to oxygen. I almost never re-use the D19. If the original is huge, the exposure should theoretically decrease. When using a timer, the first number is 0 seconds, the second number happens at 1 second. For a 5 second exposure, the end of 5 seconds happens at the sixth number. When in doubt, start all the exposures when the timer passes by 0 seconds (that's every 10 seconds). The original must be carefully aligned to the camera's grid lines and to the edges of the frame. It is very difficult to mount an out-of-alignment slide. You will look mentally retarded if you project a slide that is even slightly crooked. The lens must look almost exactly straight down at the paper. Almost all slides from Dan's photo service are slighly off-center, with a larger blank space at the bottom than at the top. Slides from Dan's photo service are mounted in Gepe anti-Newton slide mounts. The gray part faces the screen, the white part faces the lamp. The label with the red dot goes on so that the red dot is at the lower left when reading the slide. Therefore the red dots are all at the upper right in a carousel, when viewed from behind the projector looking towards the screen. I measure each original for squareness. The square ones are mounted with one slide mount rotated 90 degrees, and aluminized mylar tape on the back because of the translucency of the white part of the slide mount. The bottoms of vertical slides are frequently blocked by the heads of the audience. For that reason, verticals are a last resort, and they should be off center towards the top by a lot. Also, the projection screens in seminar rooms are frequently not square and will not accomodate verticals. This recipe is untried for other camera equipment, but I hope it's identical. I don't know how to predict what happens to F-stops and T-stops when switching between different (non-)floating-element lenses. In case you have to do this elsewhere: My incident light meter placed on our copy stand with the overhead lights on HIGH gives a reading of 1/60 sec, f/5.6 for ISO100 film, assuming that the lens is focussed at infinity. This is only for tungsten/halogen illumination and D19 developer. The spectra of the film, lamps and light meter get intertwined in this measurement. I used a Sekonic meter that probably uses CdS as the detector. If the foreign lamps are twice as bright as those that I measured (fat chance!) then expose 1/2 as long. Your first attempt at making slides with LPD4 may not be successful. Kodak's literature says that the sensitivity of LPD4 film is ISO 3.2, for their choice of developer and processing conditions. The latest batch that I used is more sensitive than any previous. For years, the exposures were 5 seconds midway between f/5.6 and 8, but the new 100-foot roll needs only about 4 seconds or so, and 3.5 sec +/- almost nothing if there are very small details to be rendered. It is possible to make title slides of less quality, but much less work, by using color slide film, then paying somebody else for the processing. Use Ektachrome 64T tungsten professional film, with illumination from the tungsten lamps of a Bencher copy stand. Set the exposures for 18% reflective gray cards, then take the picture of the real thing without further adjusting the exposure. Half stop overexposure relative to what is indicated by the gray card seems to help for black on white originals. Agfa Scala film might work, but I haven't tried it for high contrast. LOW CONTRAST (CONTINUOUS TONE) PICTORIAL SLIDES The original could be a black and white print of a gel, an electron micrograph, an illustration in a book, etc. I have used this film also for slides from an X-ray diffraction film, but the exposure setting was an adventure, and I didn't write it down. The equipment needed is the same as above for high-contrast slides. The film is Kodak Direct MP (meaning Motion Picture duplicating film). The optimum exposure is near 8, 10 or 12 seconds at f/5.6 with the above specified tungsten lamp brightness. The processing of the film is as described above except that the developer is undiluted Dektol. The developer should be nearly colorless before processing, and it's very red afterwards. The stop bath outgasses vigorously, so squeeze out as much air as possible at the stop stage, then remove the lid starting from the far side after stopping. The gas is sulfur dioxide, so don't inhale. There are other ways to do it. One could use color slide film, as described in the last paragraph of the high contrast section, above. There is also Agfa Scala film, which gives extremely nice slides, but the turn-around for processing recently decreased from about 2 weeks to about 2 days, so plan ahead. Both films have known ISO ratings, and therefore the camera's meter can be used.