Category Archives: James Fortune

4×5 Negatives

My dad didn’t want to keep risking messing up his original 35mm negatives with moving them around so much and storing them various places so he had some copies made locally.

Here we are getting started..

In this video you can see the nice new negatives…

Selecting the correct lens for the enlarger to use with 4×5 negatives…

The paper we used and how to tell whats the right side to expose…

MGIV Ilford Multigrade IV FB Fiber MATTE

This is a rare video of us actually working withe the lights out, which is interesting and hard to find on youtube because well… its dark!

Listening to my dad tell stories while we make prints

Another fun couple of hours in the darkroom with my dad. Todays fun stories he told me as we developed the prints…

How he was once hired to work at the Academy Awards in a black and white development lab AT the event, and he would develop negatives and prints as they came in and orders came in for newspapers etc. It was a huge team of people doing this. He described how prints would be scanned by a big drum roller and sent via the phone line, this was BEFORE the internet. Blew my mind.

Another story of an event I can’t remember the name of, and the rock starts were all upstairs in an area photographers did not have access too. He knew someone who told Paul Mccartney that my dad was there. He had previously photographed family portraits of Paul in his own home and had come to know my dad, so they sent someone down to bring my dad upstairs. So he was the only photographer up in that room snapping pics of the Beatles and Linda was also there and in some of the images. We developed one of those, and a fun one of Hugh Hefner with Alice Cooper. If there was a way my dad could get in touch with Hugh, and offer to sell him the negatives, that would be amazing. Alas it has been a very long time since my father lived in LA.

Love hearing my dads old stories! It makes each picture we print that much more interesting.