An article on my darkroom and studio in RFotofolio

For anyone interested RFotofolio has an article/interview with me about the building of my darkroom and studio.

https://rfotofolio.org/2018/08/30/where-we-work-brian-kosoff/

Incredible space Brian... is that a semi auto matt cutter on the wall, Holy shit I am impressed with your setup.

Bob Carnie said:

Incredible space Brian... is that a semi auto matt cutter on the wall, Holy shit I am impressed with your setup.

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Thanks Bob. I've built several darkrooms and studios already but this one really took some doing because I had to excavate the crawl space to create a third level in the house for the studio and then excavate on the second level into the hillside for the darkroom and print room.

The matt cutter is not computer controlled if that's what you meant by semi auto. But to be honest even with that I cut most matts using a dexter hand held, I bought the Speed Mat because I wanted to cut 8 ply, but at this point I rarely have time to cut my own mats and I found a very good and reasonable guy who has a computer controlled one and he does them for me now.

Beautiful space.

Thanks for sharing - just a little bit jealous of this space!

oh my god!
something I can only dream of!

Early Riser said:

Thanks Bob. I've built several darkrooms and studios already but this one really took some doing because I had to excavate the crawl space to create a third level in the house for the studio and then excavate on the second level into the hillside for the darkroom and print room.

The matt cutter is not computer controlled if that's what you meant by semi auto. But to be honest even with that I cut most matts using a dexter hand held, I bought the Speed Mat because I wanted to cut 8 ply, but at this point I rarely have time to cut my own mats and I found a very good and reasonable guy who has a computer controlled one and he does them for me now.

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If it is the Easely Speed Matt I am trying to buy one, why do you not like it.?

Stunning. Beautiful space and I love your website.

Exquisite studio space and I do understand why you want 12' ceiling!

Bob Carnie said:

If it is the Easely Speed Matt I am trying to buy one, why do you not like it.?

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I'm more comfortable doing it wth a dexter, and at this point since I have someone good and reasonable I'd rather have them do it and save myself some time.

Eric Rose said:

Stunning. Beautiful space and I love your website.

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Thanks Eric, very kind of you.

jtk said:

Exquisite studio space and I do understand why you want 12' ceiling!

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Thanks!

Thanks all for the kind words. I hope the article gave you all some useful information should you decide to build a darkroom or studio.

Mine's pretty much the same except for bare concrete floors and exposed fiberglass insulation .

Awesome, spaces, the excavation .....inspirational!

Do you do any RA-4 printing? I'm not sure anyone wants a C print anymore?

Thanks for sharing!
Mike

You stated that during excavating and restruction of the 3rd level there still was a piano standing in 2nd level. As at that level excavating was done too, was there still living possible at 2nd level? I mean, there not only was digging done, but there needed to be access and debris must have been carried away through that 2nd level to. Or did you make a passway for that?

mshchem said:

Mine's pretty much the same except for bare concrete floors and exposed fiberglass insulation .

Awesome, spaces, the excavation .....inspirational!

Do you do any RA-4 printing? I'm not sure anyone wants a C print anymore?

Thanks for sharing!
Mike

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Hi Mike, Thanks! I don't do any RA-4, at this point any an all color work I do is digital. The color heads on the enlargers is just for variable contrast in B&W.

AgX said:

You stated that during excavating and restruction of the 3rd level there still was a piano standing in 2nd level. As at that level excavating was done too, was there still living possible at 2nd level? I mean, there not only was digging done, but there needed to be access and debris must have been carried away through that 2nd level to. Or did you make a passway for that?

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We lived in the house and used the second level the whole time. All of the materials and the crew entered the house through the crawl space of what became the third level. That meant that they had to carry materials down 40 outdoor steps, go through a work door and then carry materials back up to the crawl space of the second level. As mentioned in the article one of beams they carried down was 24' long and weighed 826 pounds.

The way my house was originally built there's a wide and short driveway in the front of the house that leads to a large attached garage in front. Under the garage is a crawl space. The second living level of the house didn't start until past the garage. In the enclosed photo I am under the garage and am measuring from the wall of the second floor living space to some giant footings, covered in black plastic, that hold up the garage. This is where the print room ended up but there were issues to overcome. The first was the slope of the hill and the location of the footings, as shown by the posts on the right, was a problem. By code you have to have at least a 45 degree slope of land leading up to the footing. The location I needed for the wall was 10'4" from the existing wall of the second floor living level. But there was not enough clearance because a room with an 8 foot ceiling means there's about a foot of floor and joists below it, so I needed 9 feet of clearance between the slope and the ceiling. But that meant that the hill was in the way, I would have to violate the 45 degree code which I was not going to do so I had to come up with a solution.

That solution was to suspend the long row of flat files over the slope thereby clearing the hillside. So in the print room the width of the actual floor space is only about 6 1/2 feet, but from wall to wall it's 10 feet, a 3 foot deep shelf making up the difference. Here's the photoshop design I did for suspending that shelf over the slope. The engineers thought the threaded rods that further supported the shelf was overkill given how strong the bracing was.

Wow. Brian has a very nice taste for decoration. I love clean spaces like that.

and I thought my Keencut Ultimat took up real estate (compared to your Speed Mat) lol