Bad habits of a digital age. Lessons (re)learned.

After a long ~5 years without printing, my new darkroom is almost finished. While not completely done, it is done enough for me to be able to do my first prints in ages today. Since I had my last darkroom, I have been working in a hybrid workflow. Fortunately/unfortunately, scratches and fingerprints don't really come through in scanning. This had led me to get rather lax with handling negatives. Today was an awakening that some of my negatives have been ruined for darkroom printing because of these bad handling habits. I used to be really anal about handling negatives, but alas, how quickly we(I) forget Anyway, it's good to be back in the land of the full analog work flow. Here's a couple of today's prints from testing for dry down time. The one of my wife was for practicing dealing with a high contrast scene and the one of the row boats I chose as I thought the subtle white and black grades would help me dial in a dry down time for this paper. (Please excuse the crappy cell photo/paper curl. It's been so long since I had to scan a print, I can't find the insert to do so for my flatbed )

I went through the same process the last couple years. Got some white cotton gloves and print file negative sleeves.

For the paper curl- if you're printing up to 11x14, I really dig my canvas flipflop-dryer from eBay. Does a great job for a few bucks. I cut some extar canvas sheets to put between the print and the stretched canvas, makes it tighter and I can keep the canvas cleaner that way,

I work in an arts department at a university. there's music professor teaching music with turntables and LPs didn't bother to teach them about handling records, turntables and needles. Big mistake. There are scratches on the records the cartridges got trashed, the turntables are barely alive. In the old days, people had LP collections that lasted a lifetime and needles were rarely changed. The students were amazed at the sound of analog records event with the hisses, clicks and pops. It's like nothing they've ever experienced. Now students won't even see a CD with online music.

M Carter said:

I went through the same process the last couple years. Got some white cotton gloves and print file negative sleeves.

For the paper curl- if you're printing up to 11x14, I really dig my canvas flipflop-dryer from eBay. Does a great job for a few bucks. I cut some extar canvas sheets to put between the print and the stretched canvas, makes it tighter and I can keep the canvas cleaner that way,

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While I do keep everything in print file sleeves, I unfortunately had long ago stopped using gloves and had gotten pretty lax in my handling practices. I have since dug back out my cotton handling gloves! As for the paper curl, I was testing for dry down (which to my eye was about 8% for Adorama Glossy Fiber) and microwaved the paper to get it dry quickly.

Mainecoonmaniac said:

I work in an arts department at a university. there's music professor teaching music with turntables and LPs didn't bother to teach them about handling records, turntables and needles. Big mistake. There are scratches on the records the cartridges got trashed, the turntables are barely alive. In the old days, people had LP collections that lasted a lifetime and needles were rarely changed. The students were amazed at the sound of analog records event with the hisses, clicks and pops. It's like nothing they've ever experienced. Now students won't even see a CD with online music.

Click to expand...

I'm guessing the students didn't realize that "scratching/mixing" records requires very different needles and turntables?