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If you suddenly had no darkroom.


Take a look at the following for review:
http://www.pdarrl.org/K6RAU/ If you can tolerate his use on not standard phonetic names
http://www.hamwhisperer.com/p/morse-code-course.html

Since you are relearning CW you might like this one as it uses the Koch method of sending the letters quickly with longer time in between. Once you have all the letters, work on reducing the time in between. http://lcwo.net/courseintro
 
I have made do with about 20 square feet in a non-plummed storage closet outside of our apartment since early 2012. I can easily do up to 16x20 from 35mm, 120 and 4x5 and can even do 20x24 if I use drums. As you can see I use a sophisticated tray stacker with a tight ventilation system since the space is so small.

I am now in the process of buying a home in which a primary consideration is the nearly 500 square feet of finished basement space it has, 100% for a darkroom that will have two LPL4550 XLG enlargers and one horizontal mural enlarger that will do up to 50x70". You make do with what you have and then when you can do better, you make it a top priority.

 
I'd probably ditch B/W film if I couldn't find anywhere for an enlarger, since printing it is the whole point for me. Hybrid process doesn't interest me much. Why bother with film if you're just going to take a digital photo of the negative?

I'd keep doing slide film, as I can project it, and view it on the lightbox.
 
I can remember when Leica introduced the M monochrome and that SilverFX software came out, the photographs some produced were very impressive but I can remember looking at the guides and thinking my word that is a lot of effort sat at the computer to get a result that looks a little bit like an analog photograph. Once one has a workflow with a known film its pretty easy to get decent results from Hybrid that don't look anything like a digital image but granted does mean some time sat at a computer.

How do you make prints from your slide film?
 
I know a guy who makes the following:
Weekend evening kid and wife are asleep, he makes the kitchen window dark with cloth and tape, goes in the basement and takes up table, enlarger and all equipment in the kitchen, print for hours, and then cleans all in early morning.
Setting up takes cca 45min, cleaning and puting stuff back in the basement >45min.

Where there's a will - there's a way.
 

I did that in high school.
Mom finally decided she did not like the smell of the chemicals in the kitchen, as it was hard to ventilate the kitchen to get all the smell out. She had dad help us make a small darkroom under the house. I wish I was back in that house.
 
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