Making lith film copies of pen and ink flat art is fairly straightforward.
Lith film is very slow (ISO 8), extremely sensitive to exposure and
development. Some experimentation is certainly needed. I use a converted
enlarger base and column as a copy stand to mount the camera on. Makes easy
work for different sizes of flat art. Lens choice is based on the artwork
size but I find a 50mm macro works well in most applications.
Lighting must be bright and even. I use 500 watt photofloods with no
filtration set about 2 meters from the artwork and at a 45 degree angle.
Measure carefully for uneven areas of illumination. For this I'll put on a
long lens, 200mm or so, and spot meter the whole area for "soft" spots.
Meter a grey card or use an incident reading for a baseline starting point.
Then compose and focus your subject line art and shoot a series of
exposures, in manual, taking exposure notes of each frame. Cover +/- a
three stop spread in half-stops. Process the test strip. Best results are
obtained using Kodak's special Kodalith developer; D-11 can be used with
adequate results.
Proper exposure gives a solid black with clear lines with no blocking or
clouding of fine details. Harder than it looks :) Once you have the
exposure figured out, the rest of your pen and ink drawings will use that
setting, regardless of what the meter says.
John P
______________________________________
there is no "never" - just long periods of "not yet".
there is no "always" - just long periods of "so far".
Jonathan Greeley <jrgreeley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wondered:
> By the way! Does Zuiko make any slide duplicators for Olympus? And
> would a that sort of system work for making high contrast "pen and ink"
> copies onto lith films?
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