DARKROOM DIARIES

 Regular readers may remember that my darkroom activities were not proceeding apace.  So I went on a buying spree to get a better enlarger, kit to control chemical temperatures; and had a general rearrangement so that I could sit down at least some of the time.  All of this helped but the real leap forward came when I extended works to our bathroom to include waterpipes up into the loft; and then the installation of sink and worktop.  Bliss – no more running up and down the loft ladders to wash the prints.  Here is the finished arrangement.

Dimensions are about are about 7 square metres or so in all.

 Darkroom heaven, is it not?   I just have to be organised.  If I’m not organised I’m, well, disorganised.  The ten pound warming tray is doing a good job of keeping the chemicals at 20 degrees and there is plenty of space for drying the prints.  Great!

I must now however address a serious philosophical question.  Am I going all in for a totally analogue workflow or should I keep one foot in the digital camp?  Back in the pre-digital era there was no choice: once you had developed your film you had to make a contact sheet from the negatives where each print was the actual size of the negative.   Like this. 

 You would squint at this with a magnifying glass of some sort and try to work out which frames were worth printing.  Now it’s possible to circumvent all that faff with a computer.  You can scan the negatives and produce a digital contact print but why bother even with that?  It’s easier still to have a look at your digital positive full-size up there on the screen and assess its printing potential straightaway.

That's tempting,  but for me this mixing of the digital and analogue waters just doesn’t work. There is a huge difference between looking at a computer screen version of a photograph and holding a print – even a small one - there in your hand.  It’s two different worlds.  If I had been wavering on the question my mind was made up a couple of weeks ago when Windows 11 updates locked me out of Lightroom – and therefore my entire photo archive - for several days.  I sorted it eventually but it gave me the final push I needed to jump into the analogue pool with both feet.

DARKROOM DIARIES

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.