Sunday, March 13, 2011

                                                            New negative carrier

Yesterday I did some work with my new Zone VI negative carrier that will hold 120 format film.  The carrier is cut for a 6x7 negative but I can also use it for 6x6 as I did for the bottom negative which I took back in 1970.  I had been using pieces of glass before but a good negative carrier that holds the negative nice and flat and centered over the lens sure makes the work easier.  Also the negative cleaning process is harder with pieces of glass since you have to clean all 4 sides of the two glass sheets, as well as both sides of the negative before you can start printing.  I try to minimize the amount of retouching I have to do because I am not very good at it so if I can reduce dust spots on a print to just a few problem areas I call it good.  The cold light  does eliminate a lot of the problems one has with dust, scratches, and chips in the negative emulsion and I do not notice any drop in print sharpness.  I had a variety of negative carriers and lens boards with my Omega but I have only found one extra negative carrier now for the Zone VI and I have only one lens board which will accomodate a lens with a 39mm mount.  Nikon fortunately made all of it's el-nikkors with the 39mm mount so I can use any of my el-nikkor lenses; 50,75,105,135mm with my Zone VI enlarger.  For these two prints I used a 105 el-nikkor.  With my Omega though I had a custom built lens carrier that would accomodate Nikon camera lenses and I used to do all my printing for medium format negatives with a very high quality Nikkor 105mm bellows lens.  I am hoping someday to find a 4x5 negative carrier and a 150mm el-nikkor or another lens board that can accomodate my 150mm Rodenstock enlarger lens so I can start working again with my view camera.

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