At a garage sale this weekend I found a box set of 50 glass "lantern slides" showing various earthquake scenes in and around San Francisco circa 1906. They would make very nice prints and are in very good condition. They are about 3x4 inches or so and printed on thick glass. My question is, can they be used to produce prints? I have a traditional darkroom and modest printing skills, or is this something for an expert to do? thanks.

-- bill zelinski (willy226@yahoo.com), October 16, 2000

Answers

You can make internegatives by contacting the lantern slides to Kodak SuperXX or Ektapan film (if these are still made!). I have used both commercially for b&w internegs with no problems, but you will have to do some testing. Get a good negative and print away!

-- fred (fdeaton@knology.net), October 17, 2000.

Thanks, the feedback so far is to make an internegative, as I have no experience with this, this might be a good learning joh. I'm presuming I can "contact" print the plates onto film or use my enlarger to project the image on a 8x10 piece of film. Any suggestions for what film would work best and starting exposure times? I also presume that if I fail to get good results I could have internegs made somewhere.

-- bill zelinski (willy226@yahoo.com), October 18, 2000.

Bill, I don't know where you are, but you probably wil have a hard time finding a lab willing to handle glass slides unless you have one nearby which is highly professional and knowledgeable. As I said before Kodak Super XX and Ektapan are good for this, but it has been a long time and I don't remember exposure times. If you try to project them to 8x10 you are going to have some inordinately long exposure times and you run the risk of reciprocity law failure. I work for NASA and I occasionally must print scientific glass negatives/positives. The last few batches I did I scanned on a high end flatbed scanner (with negative/positive adaptor), output 4x5 negatives on a film recorder, and printed from these negatives. The results were quite nice. I am very experienced in handling glass media, but I always cringe when I see it. The fragility factor is truly frightening, but (knock on wood here) I have never damaged a glass negative or positive. Best of luck to you, and let us know how your experience turns out.

-- fred (fdeaton@knology.net), October 18, 2000.