Prints from movie frames

**tom hardwick** · May 24th, 2001, 10:08 AM

I've been experimenting for some time and have found the best way (for me, that is) of making prints from individual Super8 frames.

First of all it's as well to remember that the enlargements are going to be huge, so the choice of the individual frames is quite important. I chose K40 frames shot on my Slik mounted 1014E in good light, mainly portraits of friends and family as they sat in the garden. Gently resting people equals no motion blur.

I first of all put the Super 8 strip of film into the masked down 35mm neg holder in my colour enlarger, but with the enlarger head touching the ceiling and the paper holder on the floor the image was so dim I couldn't see a damn thing.

So I hit on the idea of rephotographing the tiny Super8 frame onto 35mm colour transparency film; then I'd have this processed and print from the slide. This worked well.

I mounted my lensless 35mm SLR under the enlarger and projected the Super8 frame into the SLR, using the viewfinder and moving the SLR back and forth to frame and focus the image. I used the SLR's light meter and bracketed my exposures.

When the slides came back from processing I printed these onto 14" x 11" Cibachrome paper in the normal way and the results are amazingly good.

I've stuck a tiny (reject) super8 frame to the back of each print. I've cut off the perforation and the magnetic track to leave a minute 5,6 x 4,1 mm "negative". When I show the print to people I present the back side first, saying ,"Here's the neg, now do you want to see the print?"

This dramatically shows the potential energy in each and every Super8 frame. The level of detail and the dynamic range is remarkable, especially considering that this is a 3rd generation print. Try that with a MiniDV frame if you dare.

tom.

**AlexGfromUK** · May 25th, 2001, 10:57 PM

The image will already be in focus when it falls on the film plane, because you focus an enlarger by magnifying the image that hits the baseboard below it.

**AlexGfromUK** · May 25th, 2001, 11:04 PM

I just finished doing this very thing for my final major project at art college. I rotated the enlarger head so it projected sideways (projector style), then put an slr with a 70-210 lens at 210, right up to nearly touching the enlarger lens, (this combination of lens gives a focused image which fils about 80% of a 35mm still frame. I was duplicating onto TMAX 100 b+w neg film, so I taped an orange filter onto the enlarger lens to compensate for the loss of contrast in duplicating colour to b+w. The results were fantastic (I think). Does anyone want to see scans? I managed 12x16" fibre based prints.