big prints

For a while I've had in my head this way of pushing my epson 4800 to print large format pictures. It's pretty obvious, but I'm cutting images in half and in thirds and printing out "panels" of those images. I'm definitely pushing the print quality to the edge and maybe a little beyond. I'm also unsure of the final format; I have a few ideas I'll share later. The two forest pictures are from 4x5 negatives, the deer is from a 6x7 negative.

Here's a picture illustration of my process. A couple of issues: cutting glass was a new idea in order to speed up the proofing of pictures. You don't see it, but the glass fits into the scanner and hold an 8x10" sheet of negatives flat to the scanner, much like you would in the darkroom. The other thing you don't see is the film development, but it's much like in any darkroom except I'm squatting over the shower basin. The third thing you don't see here is the larger proofs I print out to fine-tune the image and the splitting of the image in photoshop. I guess some things you'll have to just imagine.

Developing in the shower


The clean-up


Cutting glass for contact sheet scanning


Good cut/bad cut


Scanning negatives


Printing out contact sheet


Looking at contact sheet


In process


A couple other larger format prints


The almost-finished picture