I’m afraid that matters have not proceeded in the darkroom at the pace I had expected. First of all, I did not meet my own target of producing by the end of 2022 a print which was good enough for me to mount and frame myself. Producing a print, I have found, is not so difficult. Producing a decent print is another matter altogether.
The main problem is getting a well exposed basic print. You can see the problem with the two images of the boats to the right here. These are experimental prints and as you can see they are too dark.
f8 @ 6 seconds
f11 at 6 seconds
This means that the exposure in the darkroom is too long. You are supposed to aim for an exposure of between 10 and 15 seconds with an aperture of about f8 on the enlarger lens. But the one to the left above is only 6 seconds at f8: anything more than that and it would be completely black. The one to the right is f11 (ie half the exposure) and is still too dark. I can only assume that my negatives are a bit thin which might be something to do with the way I am developing them. Decision? I decide to park the problem for the moment and simply go up to f16 on the enlarger if necessary to get myself into the 10-15 second zone. And while I am on - this is not the only problem I am having.
Firstly, I am finding the process physically uncomfortable. Secondly, I find the Intrepid enlarger quite a fiddly thing to deal with. And thirdly, I have a temperature problem in the darkroom: although the loft is well-insulated, as the weather grows colder it gets harder and harder to keep the chemicals up to 20 degrees which is the standard operating temperature.
Still, nothing worth having is easily got. I decide that I must take a lesson from the French and reculer pour mieux sauter en avant. Go backwards the better to leap ahead. Or perhaps more accurately: get out the wallet and buy more kit. By this time I had discovered the existence of the Second Hand Darkroom website - an irresistible cornucopia of darkroom kit. I bought a proper big enlarger (a Meopta Magnifax) and an RH Timer - which is a thing of beauty in its own right. I also bought a two-slot Nova Print Processor to keep the chemicals at the right temperature. Just after that I spotted an old darkroom warming tray for a tenner on ebay and snapped that up out of curiosity. Then I rearranged the whole darkroom so that I could be sitting down most of the time.
This was beginning to look like displacement activity - spending all my time creating the darkroom rather than printing. So at that point I turned out the lights and started printing again. More next month.