Well, I bit the bullet and went off to get myself an enlarger; rather a lot
of hours in the darkroom later (I see what you mean.. I was rather surprised
when I emerged and it was 2am) I now have some 8x10s that look, all things
considered, pretty good. (though I need to spend some time with windex; the
specks of goo that seemed to not want to brush off are more visible than I'd
expected).
Thanks for all the advice! This is all a lot easier than I'd thought it
would be; once I'd burned a couple of sheets of paper getting the exposure
horribly wrong (and another couple getting it wrong in the other direction,
sigh) everything started to make sense. I got a focus scope, and that's
_very_ handy; I need to play with filters more to be sure I understand the
effects there, but I get the basic idea, at least, so it's just practise
from here..
Is there some sort of darkroom mailing list? I found darkroomsource.com,
and there's the photo.net forums or rec.photo.darkroom, but they don't have
the same 'feel' as mailing lists.
and, while I know it's a bit OT, a couple of teensy questions just to make
sure my understanding of everything is correct:
1. I only actually need the room to be dark (or safelit) during the period
paper-out-of-black-bag...paper done fixing? I can't see what else would
'care' about light other than that, but I may be wrong.
2. More fiddly; the enlarger I got (Meopta Opemus II, fwiw) came with two
lenses; a 75mm, and a 35mm. Experimenting, the 75mm will project a whole 6x6
negative, but I can't get 35mm negatives to enlarge much past about 7"x9" or
so. The 35mm lens makes everything much larger, but the image circle that's
projected is noticeably smaller than a 35mm frame.
I can get around the 35mm size issue because the head on this enlarger
rotates 90 degrees, so I could pin paper to the wall and project against
that -- alternatively, I could pick up a 50mm lens, I guess.
question is: It seems to me as if longer focal length = larger area of
coverage and smaller magnification; is this correct?
thanks,
-- dan
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|