I sold my Vivitar Slide printer a while back because I don't have any slides. Since I scan my hard copies and negatives, everything really ends up digital eventually. However, I really wanted to play around with emulsion lifts and image transfers.
It was a quiet day today so I decided to try an experiment. I setup my Polaroid 360 with the tripod, close-up attachment, and cable release in front of my LCD monitor to see if I could photograph on screen digital images and have them look OK on 669 film.
After two packs of test shots, I determined the steps needed to get good quality images:
1) Tweak my monitor settings and drop the contrast significantly (10 of 100 instead of 50 of 100). This kept the highlights from blowing out and gave me a contrast range which seemed similar to what I was getting from my Vivitar.
2) Warm the image significantly! It looks like the monitor is cool and the reciprocity failure of the film moves the image way blue/cyan over a 5-10 second exposure. I placed (i.e. held) an 82B warming filter over the lens. I also filtered the image in Photoshop with an additional 82 warming filter with density ranging between 50 and 100%.
3) Size the image on screen at the equivalent of a 3x enlargement of the print size. Thus, about 8x10.
4) Turn off all the lights in the room.
5) Adjust the exposure 1-2 stops towards L to compensate for additional light coming off the monitor from out of frame that the electronic eye will receive.
6) Frame, focus, and shoot!
Once I had this down, there was a little fiddling with exposure and filter settings for each particular image but nothing more than one would need to do using a slide printer. The images did not look like they were taken from on screen at all. They looked good. Once they were mashed onto image transfers and emulsion lifts there was no way to know the source.
I'm really psyched this worked out. Working with digital originals is very helpful to me and the ability to use Photoshop to filter, change hue, etc is much more flexible than using gels in the Vivitar.
Now I need to work on my emulsion lift and image transfer techniques!
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