Home colour printing is not a mass
production process so I decided to copy some of last year’s holiday
slides onto Colour Negative with a bellows unit, bouncing flash from a
small gun off a white card at 45 degrees. A 12 exposure test on Kodak
VR100 produced negatives with varying degrees of under-exposure resulting
in low quality prints except for one where I forgot to stop down after
composing.
It was obvious that some means of
exposure determination was required. Using this one good exposure (F2) as
a basis I substituted a 60 watt lamp for the 45 degree card and set a
shutter speed which gave a centralised needle on the camera’s TTL meter
when this particular slide was in position. I then changed the aperture to
F5.6 as a useful mid-value and re-centralised by adjusting the shutter
speed. This was in fact 1/15 and now had the confidence to copy 36 varying
slides, each time substituting the lamp and adjusting the aperture to
centralise the needle but varying by half a stop for slides with large
light or dark areas. It may sound a fiddly business but I built up speed
after the first ten slides especially as I have a simple gubbins with a
slot which holds the white card in the correct position. This is just a
piece of hardboard with a short length of slotted beading stuck on at 45
degrees to hold the flash gun and the opal diffuser which holds the slide
on the bellows. I always position both the flash (GN 60 feet at 100 ASA)
and the diffuser 8 inches from the centre of the angled card.
This set up gave me 36 nicely exposed
colour negatives and 36 very acceptable prints.