First, books!
These are the books I found useful over the course of the project. Some are more useful than others of course, but all of them are worth having on hand. I have a horrible habit of not being satisfied with having a library copy of a book because then I can’t make notes in the margins, which is why I buy them on Abebooks.

Dye Transfer Made Easy, by Mindy Beede
Clearly this is a book on Dye Transfer, but the section on making Colour separations direct from 35mm Colour slides is really well illustrated and explained. The DIY pin registration system they outline could also be of use. A lot of Dye Transfer literature could be applicable to certain parts of this process, so keep that in mind.

The Color Print Book: A Survey of Contemporary Color Photographic Print Making Methods for the Creative Photographer, by Arnold Gassan
Not tremendously useful technically, but very very interesting and handy to lend context to the work you’re doing.

Photogravure: An Archaeological Research, by Jan Pettersson
This is your key text. Pettersson deals with Copperplate Photogravure in his colour photogravure work, but most aspects are easily transferable to photopolymer materials if you’re not set up for copper. As far as I know this is the only contemporary work published on Colour Photogravure. See here for ordering details.

Materials:
Toyobo Printight 73GR (thin) This is your photopolymer plate material. The Toyobo stuff gave me the best tonal range of all of the materials I tried, and it seems to be widely recommended for this purpose. (Available from Melbourne Etching Supplies)

Process Inks
You’ll need a Cyan, a yellow, and a Magenta etching ink. These are sometimes called Process colours as a carryover from the printing industry. Caligo make a wonderful range of water-washup process colours which worked absolutely perfectly for me.
Process Cyan (BL 24911)
Process Magenta (RD 63601)
Process Yellow (YL 91779)

They’re available in Australia from Neil Wallace.

Etching Paper
This is of course vital. I use Magnani because it’s what I learned printmaking with, but nearly any etching paper will be appropriate to begin your experimentation with. Magnani Australia distribute a wonderful range.

Filters:
If you’re making colour separations manually, either in camera or in the darkroom, you’ll need a set of colour separation filters to do the deed. Kodak made these in their Wratten filter line, but everything indicates that they’re no long manufactured. eBay is your best bet.
I used the following filters:
Wratten #25 – Red
Wratten #47 – Blue (Alternatively, 47b)
Wratten #58 – Green

Handy things to have
A Kodak Colour Separation Guide and Greyscale (Product code #Q-13). These are available from Freestyle Photo, and it’s endlessly helpful as a test target.

An Illumitrans Slide Copier, if you can get access to one, is really handy to have for making colour separations directly from slides onto black and white film.

A densitometer is necessary if you plan to get serious about this and get really accurate colours. I never had the chance to use mine appropriately.

Equipment

You’re going to need an etching press, and preferably an etching studio.

I was lucky enough to have access to the South Australian School of Art’s rather lovely print studios.

You’ll need an ultraviolet exposure unit, and preferably a calibrated one. By this I mean, the unit measures the UV output of the bulb and adjusts the exposure time accordingly, so you know # units of exposure always equals # units of exposure. Bulb warm up and cooldown can be a real problem. Again, I was lucky enough to get to use the Photography department’s very nice exposure unit.

You’ll need to know how to print. If you’re coming to this medium without any print experience I recommend you have a printmaking instruct you on the proper methods. Paper handling, inking and printing procedures are really things you need to learn to do properly to avoid harming yourself or your equipment. The instruction of an accomplished printmaker is invaluable, as these are all things that are quite difficult to learn from books alone.

A brisk rundown of the printing process.

First, you make your colour separations. You then output these separations onto a transparent material, either digitally onto a medium like Pictorico, or in the darkroom by enlarging your separation negatives onto Ortho-Litho film. I used Arista Ortho film, which quite annoyingly has now been discontinued.

From these transparencies we make our plates. This involves contact the transparency onto the plate material under pressure, such as from heavy glass or a vacuum frame, and then exposing to UV light. How much UV light is up to a lot of testing, but since everybody’s setup differs it’s useless for me to tell you what my exposures were. “Enough” is about as much as you can say.
You also expose an aquatint screen in contact with your plate in order to give it the grain to hold your ink.
The plates are then developed and hardened as per normal. Photopolymer material is usually simply developed in warm water, which is quite handy.

So, we have our plates! Then we have to ink the plates up. You’re gonna want a big box of disposable gloves for this part. I found cheap plastic palette knives to be really useful for inking up my plates, and I used them more than the specially designed ink wipers I purchased for the job. Figures.

Ink up all 3 plates at once, and don’t dilly-dally, as you don’t want the ink to begin to dry on your plates. How much time this takes depends on the ink you use, but so long as you dont step out for lunch half way through you should be fine.

At the end of this inking process you’ll have your separate plates sitting all nicely lined up and ready to print.

Now, the printing.

Layer one, our yellow plate. Looks pretty boring.

On goes the Magenta! And it looks like…uhh. Orange. Hey, did we do this right?

On goes our Cyan, and it all comes together. It’s like this every time, everything looks pretty rubbish until you get to the Cyan layer and then things just click.

It’s worth mentioning that the printing order always goes Yellow, Magenta and Cyan. I tried printing in different combinations for kicks, and while you do get some interesting results they’re always muddy in comparison. So, keep this in mind.

That’s the basic rundown. I only had 6 months to explore this, so there’s lots more to be done, but I hope this makes you curious enough to explore further. I’ll post more when I can.

Now these are apparently not uncommon, though I’ve yet to be able to find one. It may be another case of things that never really took off in Australia…the only thing that seems common here is Six-20 box brownies. Anyway, if you come into one, these links might help.

The Living Image: Roller blind shutters
Paul Ewins: Thornton-Pickard Shutter Rebuild
Patent No. 697,350. Invented by L. Moretti, assigned April 8th, 1902: Focal Plane Shutter (Thornton Pickard Company)
Patent No. 779,665. Invented by E. V. Piercy, assigned January 10, 1905: Photographic Shutter (Thornton Pickard Company)
Patent No. 976,712. Invented by F.P. Whitehead, assigned November 22nd, 1910: Photographic Shutter (Thornton Pickard Company)
Relevant thread on APUG

And if anyone has one they want to get rid of, contact me, I kinda need one…

I’ve not ordered from them personally, but they’re well regarded within the community. A source for all those crazy filter sizes like 40mm, or 36mm slip on, or Series type filters – all of that stuff, in one spot.

Well, that was all unnecissary. Try it yourself, but it really makes no difference when you peel the film. The development process used for polaroid film is what’s called a monobath. A very very complex and well designed monobath, but a monobath. It means that it contains a very quick acting developer coupled with a quick acting fixer, mixed into one. The image is developed by the developer components, and the fixer takes over not long after, finishing the process. So development is stopped by the chemistry itself. Which means it doesnt matter when you peel the film at all, the times listed are just the minimum development times.
So don’t stress about it.

EDIT: Looking back this was a bit of a blanket statement to make. I believe some of the earlier polaroid peel apart emulsions could be damanged by developing for too long, but with Fuji FP100B/100C and FP-3000B, the only peel apart film currently available new, I’ve noticed no ill effects by extending development by up to an hour. After 8 hours, FP-100C has shown the emulsion to soften though. So, dont stress about it, but exercise some cuation.

Now some background – the first Polaroid cameras were of the roll film variety, which to my understanding involved two rolls of film in the camera – the negative material and the positive print material, that rolled together and sandwiched during development to yeild a final print. This film is long long discontinued and was superseeded by polaroid pack film. You can read more about these early polaroid cameras, and all the others, on The Land List.

While we’re at it, This site here has pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about converting polaroids, including these early models. However, he doesnt tackle the 4×5″ conversion, and at this stage I was quite curious.

I’d always heard two names thrown around – Littman and Razzle. The Littman 45 Single is available here and seems to be exactly what I was expecting – an early Polaroid 110-type camera, which cost maybe $40 on the used market, adapted for 4×5″ format.
They start at, supposedly, $2,000USD, up to $7,000, depending which model you want. Last time I looked into this, that’s as far as I got, and I felt pretty miserable about the idea by this stage. Some quick research shows that Littman himself isn’t exactly smiled upon by the community, and theats of litigation aren’t new. Apparently the idea is patented, however you patent something like this. Looks like a neat camera, but I have moral objections to paying through the nose for prestige-pricepoint items.

And the idea isnt new actually, there’s plenty of people who have done it themselves with varying degrees of success. There are some smaller names out there doing conversions commercially, and DIY jobs even show up on ebay now and then.

Next, I took a look at Razzle, and found out – damn, the chap is Australian. Melbourne, to be exact, and just a few suburbs away from a friend who’s floor I sleep on now and then.

Here’s a clip from his youtube channel, clearly poking some light fun at the littman…

Check out the Razzle here.

Image borrowed, with best intentions, from the Razzle homepage.

I like it. 900USD, even less if you supply your own lens and/or body. Considering the amount of work that goes into them, the custom machining of parts, and your choice of leather for a bit extra, pretty acceptable.

I would like one. Please?
Time to start saving.

Have a look at the other projects on his site too, there’s some pretty interesting panoramic stuff. Great to see a tinker at work.

Also, on further research, it turns out Mr. Littman is a bit of a dick.

EDIT: The Byron? Yes, the Byron – another challenger appears, see here. I like the flush form of the back, and he’s posted a lot of good details of the trials and innovations he’s made. More tinkering and a lot of pictures.

Also, while we’re at it, check out Noah Schwartz work in the same field.

Water – 250ml
Paracetamol – 30x 500mg tablets
Sodium Sulfite – 50g
Sodium Hydroxide – 20g

EDIT:
Yep, Sodium Sulfite isn’t Washing Soda…that would be Sodium Carbonate. That’s what I get for not taking highschool chemistry. So what I made up before was pretty much useless. I’ll get some Sodium Sulfite and try all this again.

Sodium Sulfite is also known, and is available, commonly as Washing Soda. Harmless stuff.
Paracetamol is just paracetamol, also known as Panadol (or Tylenol in the US). Pretty cheap too, under a dollar for 24 tablets of generic brand. I use Coles home brand. Also Harmless.
Sodium Hydroxide is known as Caustic Soda or Lye, and is also fairly common. Highly corrosive, please wear gloves when you mix this. If you get it in your eyes, bye bye eyesight, so goggles too. In combination with water, reaction produces a fair amount of heat. Because of this, please add the solution to the sodium hydroxide, rather than add sodium hydroxide to the solution. Just to be safe.

Mix in the order indicated, let stand for 72 hours (3 days), then dilute and use an Rodinal. Behaves very similarly, times and dilutions are apparently totally interchangeable. Shelf life of approximately 90 days.

I’ve mixed up a batch of this, and it’s sitting down in the darkroom stewing away. I’ll run a test in a few days and develop two rolls, one in Rodinal and one in this. Should be fun!

Links:
[photobattery.com] – Loads of batteries, selling all alternatives mentioned above.
[C.R.I.S.] – Mercury battery adapters.
[Microtools] – Sells an array of batteries, and other cool stuff

The diagonal of 35mm is a 43.26, which would be closest to a 42mm lens. So now you see why 50mm is seen as semi-telephoto by some people, and why anything from 35mm, 40mm or 50mm is considered the ideal focal length. It’s personal taste. 35mm is just as close as 50mm, but wider.

But what about some other formats?
6×6/56×56: 79.2/80mm
6×7/56×70: 89.64/90mm
6×8/56×80: 97.65/100mm
6×9/56×90: 106/105mm
4×5/101.6×127.0: 162.64/150mm

So in medium format, the diagonal seems to be pretty close to the generally agreed upon focal length. In 4×5, 150mm is considered about standard, but now it all gets open to interpretation again. Keeping in mind that these measurements aren’t exact and can/do differ from camera to camera, and through my mistakes.

There you go, some more stuff you didn’t need to know but now do.

*Well, roll film formats are open to interpretation, apparently. While ideally they should be the size their names suggest in cm, for example 6×6 should be 6x6cm, of course. Of course? No. It’s usually 56mm from one edge of the film to the other, and the “length” (along the roll of the film) of the image size varies from camera to camera. Usually it’s roughly right, but don’t be surprised to see something like 56x83mm for 6×9. These are negligible variations, but it means what is seen as a standard is far from it.
Photography isn’t really an exact science.

Ilford Postcard paper is 4×6″ double weight, Black and White Multicontrast paper. 4×6″ is, as you may remember, your standard photo lab size. When you go to drop off a roll of colour print film to be developed, it comes back printed on 4×6″ colour paper. These days, made by either Fuji or Kodak.

Some people arent too impressed by the humble 4×6″ format, because it’s so common. But, what may not be obvious at first, is that it fits the 35mm format pretty much perfectly.

A 35mm frame is 24x36mm in size. A 4×6″ piece of paper is, in metric, 10x15cm.
The aspect ratio of 35mm is 1.5, and the aspect ratio of 4×6″ is exactly the same – 1.5
To get your aspect ratio, divide the larger side by the smaller size, 36/24 = 1.5. Pretty straight forward, but rather informative.
So you can basically fit everything from a 35mm frame onto a 4×6″ sheet.

Let’s look at the other formats available for Ilford Portfolio paper:

Now this is just for Portfolio paper, Multigrade Deluxe has a much large array of sizes. I’ll post an article covering all the sizes in the Ilford catalogue when I can – it’s a pretty huge catalogue.

But looking at these ratios, you can see that 8×10 doesnt fit 35mm at all well, but despite this it remains the most common size. The world standardised on 8×10″, and for the most part it’s a very appealing size – I have some nice prints in that size on my wall right next to me and I’m very fond of them. But you effectively lose around an inch either side of possible image. Really, 8×12 would be more ideal…11×14 seems like it could be promising though.