Creative negative/positive sandwiching techniques

[Rolland Rainbow Elliott <X93ELLIOTT1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone!
I recently spotted an old issue of "Popular Photography" in which beautiful
soft focus pictures were taken with slide film.  Although this procedure
could be applied to any kind of film I was wondering if anyone has used this
approach when shooting Color IR film and what their impressions have been.

Briefly the technique is as follows:
1.  Use a tripod mounted camera and use slide film.
2.  Take a picture of your subject with the lens out of focus and with the
    camera set to overexpose the slide film by one stop.
3.  Take an identical picture of your subject, but this time, make sure the
    subject is in focus and that the camera is set to overexpose the slide film
    by two stops.
4.  Get your film developed and when the slides come back sandwich the two
    overexposed slides together to acheive a softfocus picture.  
5.  The results shown in the article look really stunning.  

This approach might also reduce the apparent contrast of color IR, by giving
it a softer appearance.  However, it would probably require some
experimentation, and this can be very expensive with the current prices of
color IR film.

I was also wondering if anyone has ever sandwiched  B&W IR
negatives with regular color negative film?  If so, how did you compensate
for the exposure? I was thinking of trying the following technique:
1.  Use a tripod.  Have one camera loaded with B&W IR film and another camera
    loaded with regular color negative film.
2.  Take a picture of your subject with the regular color negative film.
3.  Take the exact same picture of your subject with B&W IR film, but
    This time underexpose the shot by one stop.
4.  Get the film developed and sandwich the matching B&W and Color negatives.  
5.  Send them to a custom lab to print.

I've never seen this done, but I think the following will occur.
Subjects that reflect little or no IR will show their normal color rendition,
while subject that reflect a lot of IR light will have lighter colors, a
grainier look, and might even appear to glow a little due to the
anti-haliation layer effect.  Just a guess, but I think it would give a neat
sudo-color IR print.  The only problem is that you need two cameras with
identical lenses for this method to be practical.

The reason for underexposing the B&W IR film a stop, is to downplay the IR
effect a little in the resulting sandwiched negative.  B&W IR negatives can
be quite dense in the highlight areas and I'm guessing this might cause
problems in the printing process.  Just a guess though, since I've only done
color printing a few times.  Perhaps some other exposure method would work
better.  

Like I said I haven't tried either method, but would be very interested in
learning what the results would be if anyone else has tried these methods.
Happy shooting,
Rolland Elliott

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