Business Cards and Contact Printing

When I went to the Krappy Kamera reception a few weeks ago I met a lot of really cool people, most of them photographers.  They kept handing me their business cards, which was really cool because I never had a chance to talk to professional photographers before.  Unfortunately, I had nothing to offer in return except for, "Well um, I have this little blog with [back then] 5 posts on it."

So, I needed business cards but I had no idea how many I needed -- my biggest fear is having a stack of 500 printed and then never handing any of them out.  I'm dreading the day when I'm old and broken and I find a dusty box in the attic with 498 pristine business cards, a reminder of that time when I thought I'd make something of myself.

I'm just kidding.  I'm having a blast with this blog, and I'm getting great feedback from people, and I'd love to have something to give to people I meet to direct them here.

Today, I printed 64 business cards.  In the darkroom.  These will basically be my rookie card.  If I ever make it big (haha), there's no way it would be at all practical to continue doing this.  Here's how I did it:

This will be a contact print.  Basically, you stick something transparent on a piece of photo paper, weigh it flat with a piece of glass, expose it to light, and get a negative image.  All the transparent parts go black and all the opaque parts go white.  If you do this with negative film, you get a negative of a negative, which is a finished photo.



I printed out the guidelines and text on transparency paper (this was the only digital part of this process), and laid some negative frames on top of it, with a dab of glue on a corner of each one to hold them in place.

Then I turned off the lights and put everything on top of a piece of photo paper, and put that into my contact printer.  A contact printer is basically just a heavy piece of glass on a hinge.  It holds everything completely flat (in contact, hence "contact printing") with each other.  If anything isn't perfectly flat, it comes out blurry.

In the old days, sometimes press photographers would set everything up in their hotel rooms, and then flick the lights on for a certain amount of time to expose their contact sheets (more on contact sheets later).  I used the enlarger though, because there's more control over the process because I can use a timer and a contrast filter.

And then from here, it's like wet-printing any other photo.  It goes in the developer, then the stop bath, then the fixer, and it's ready to hang up and dry.








There are two types of photo paper -- fiber-based and resin-coated.  The woman I bought my enlarger from included a big stack of old, unexposed fiber-based paper.  I've been avoiding it because it's old, but I figured I'd finally put it to some use.  Fiber-based paper yields better image depth over resin-coated, but it curls a lot as it dries.  By the next morning, if left to hang freely, these papers will be rolled up like cannolis.




So, I had to weigh them down with something until they dried.  What better than this:

Remember when I mentioned contact sheets earlier?  Contact sheets are when you cut a roll of negatives into strips and contact print them all together so you can inspect them in positive form.  Here's one of mine from when we went to Blue Hill at Stone Barns and went for a walk around the farm:

Disclaimer: my contact sheets are not nearly as organized as Magnum's.  They're completely out of order and some strips are upside down.  Not to mention, the photos aren't nearly as good.

Anyway, Magnum Contact Sheets is a collection of a whole stack of Magnum Photos' contact sheets.   The book is gigantic, and perfect for flattening prints.  You'll see contact sheets from big names like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson along with tons of others.  It's great because it includes the photos in between the iconic photos that have made history.  

Originally I was thinking, "these guys can't just be shooting keeper after keeper, roll after roll." but that's just what they did.  This book is the highest density of photography per cubic inch you can ever experience in physical form.  If you're remotely interested in photography, or how it's made, you should definitely have a look at this book.  Just be prepared to lug home 8 pounds of photography.