A new beginning: Darkroom tips and tricks

[atenlaugh]

Easels are pretty well essential for fibre paper and jolly useful for RC - you can keep RC flat with a bit of double sided tape in the middle though as they tend to curl "upwards" in teh centre. If you want white borders, get an easel.

Cheers, Bob.

I've been doing this darkroom thing for a while now since I started the post...

Bob, I actually got an ancient 5x7 enlarger a while back (free!), and it has a border-maker/cropper built in (Four sets of knobs that change the width/length of light allowed past the bellows - very handy!) Between that and a two-bladed easel and a piece of glass (there might be some argument to this, but it's what I always did for contact printing, and works great for my enlarging!), and FB paper works fine - perfectly flat.

Writing everything down is probably the best thing that happened to my darkroom technique. It seems obvious, but I'm not a naturally organized person...also, stubborn. Ah, well.

And dust for me has actually been much better with large format. Those small format negatives are just so fiddly...



Edit: Picking a "revealing time" and multiplying that by a controlled number is a very good idea; consistency even after developer isn't so fresh and temperature changes. Especially helpful on edition prints.

 

[JustK]

Someone mentioned buying spare bulbs, and to that I'll add buy a "surge protector" to plug your equipment into, one day I blew two new enlarger bulbs because of sudden surges or spikes in our electricity here; plus if you get the kind of surge protector with an on/off switch, you can turn on/off your equipment in one shot, this helps me a lot as I go from my bathroom/darkroom to the kitchen/viewing room.

Good Luck!
Krystyna

 

[Bob F.]

Between that and a two-bladed easel and a piece of glass (there might be some argument to this, but it's what I always did for contact printing, and works great for my enlarging!), and FB paper works fine - perfectly flat.

Arrrrggghhhh!!!!!

Seriously, think about dumping the glass. It works fine for contacts as there is no image passing through the glass - just the light. Putting the glass between the negative and the paper has several effects. It will distort the image, it gives two more surfaces to pick up dust and it will shift the focus (by approx half the thickness of the glass IIRC). The easel will hold the paper flat enough. If it's really bendy, you can just bend it back on itself a little to relax it. I've never heard of anyone using a sheet of glass in that way... (watch 'em all pop up now! )...

Cheers, Bob.

 

[Donald Qualls]

Bob, we used to use glass to make borderless prints when I was in high school (about the time Pentax switched to the K mount). As I recall, with our young eyes, we'd just eyeball focus through the glass and got perfectly fine results (of course, we had so much dust on the negative and glass carrier, it was hard to see additional flecks on the print glass -- but fingerprints *did* show).

 

[firecracker]

Get fresh air. Give enough oxygen to your brain periodically and rest your eyes a bit if you work in long hours.

Also check your finished prints under different lights sometimes.

 

[removed account4]

experiment a little bit.

don't forget to enjoy yourself

-john

 

[atenlaugh]

Arrrrggghhhh!!!!!

Seriously, think about dumping the glass. It works fine for contacts as there is no image passing through the glass - just the light. Putting the glass between the negative and the paper has several effects. It will distort the image, it gives two more surfaces to pick up dust and it will shift the focus (by approx half the thickness of the glass IIRC). The easel will hold the paper flat enough. If it's really bendy, you can just bend it back on itself a little to relax it. I've never heard of anyone using a sheet of glass in that way... (watch 'em all pop up now! )...

Cheers, Bob.

Bob,

As someone else mentioned it: young eyes! And, certainly, if you want to forward me the money for a four-bladed easel...

In any case, it's worked fine so far (I see no noticable difference between my various methods). And after all, isn't it looking just good enough to flame your ego what really matters?

-Nate

 

[Flotsam]

I just ran across a marble cutting board that someone gave me as a gift several years ago. It was a lousy cutting board because it dulled the knives quickly but it is a jim dandy weight for pressing prints after they come out of the dry mounting press. It's perfectly flat and heavy and will be easy to handle once I put some handles on the back. Beats the heck out of the big coffee table book that I have been using.

 

[glbeas]

I just ran across a marble cutting board that someone gave me as a gift several years ago. It was a lousy cutting board because it dulled the knives quickly but it is a jim dandy weight for pressing prints after they come out of the dry mounting press. It's perfectly flat and heavy and will be easy to handle once I put some handles on the back. Beats the heck out of the big coffee table book that I have been using.

I suspect it was really for making candy on, but I believe you're on the right track with it now.