[digest-type reply..]
> On the other hand, if your exposures are consistent and
> you're not going for the ultimate print from each negative
> you can bang them out pretty fast -- time in the developer
> is pretty much the limiting step.
This is what I'm finding is the time-consuming part -- I'm using Ilford
everywhere, so it's 60 seconds in developer, 15 in stop, 30 in fixer, slosh
around in the tank of water I have handy, and every few sheets, I take them
all out of the darkroom to the sink in the other corner of the basement to
wash + hang them. But then..
> You can save time and rachet off a bunch of 4x5 prints easily
> enough by running a single picture through the entire process
> and making sure that the exposure is correct. If this shot's
> exposure is representative of the rest of the roll you can fly
> through an entire roll in just a few minutes. Put your
> unexposed sheets of paper in a lightsafe box on your left and
> put the exposed sheets of paper in a lightsafe box on your
> right. Start with the beginning of the roll, expose, advance,
> expose, advance,... meanwhile storing the exposed sheets for
> later development. Once you get half the roll done, stop and
> process the batch all together under one timer-run. Use your
> hands to shuffle the sheets in the chemistry.
Which I'd never thought of. I've only been printing up 8x10s so far so I
have lots of image to work with and see what's going on -- so it just didn't
occur to me that I could put more than one shot in the chemicals at the same
time. I'll need another light proof box to stop the exposed-but-not-printed
paper from getting messed up, but that's easy enough. This is going to make
my life a _lot_ quicker.
(I'm used to working out the best way to do repetitive manual tasks; making
kites where I have to measure, trim, heat-seal, and knot both ends of 96
bits of line meant that I had a lot of incentive to avoid too much
back-and-forth. I was stuck in the mental mold that each shot takes 3-4
minutes what with all the fiddling around at either end of the process, but
this should help a lot. It's not as if 3-4 minutes is a long time, but a
fair amount of that's spent just watching seconds tick by, and that's the
bit I'd missed how to parallelise)
> Like everything else you get a
> "feel" for the image you are after.Sometimes I will spend
> hours printing and reprinting 3 or 4 images from a roll of
> film to get the images I want.
Yes, I've been playing around with this sort of thing, and it's lots of fun
-- I think it's just a matter of working out which ones I want to start
working on, and that's where I want to make some sort of medium-sized
enlargement to make sure the image is going to be worth the time.
> I guess you'll get the combined answer of "yes" here. There are probably
> as many ways of working in a darkroom as there are people.....
That's what I expected to be the case, but I'm just hoping to try and
average out some sort of general tips from this lot. (one neat thing I saw
on rec.photo.darkroom; when loading film onto metal reels (which I still
mess up 500f the time), rather than turning the lights off, opening the
canister, fiddling around with the little spring clip, etc, start off in the
light; retrieve the end of the film (or make sure to not rewind it all the
way) and then do the initial loading stuff in the light. That seems to be
the fiddliest part, so this way you can make sure that it gets going
properly.
> This works well as long as I make sure that my exposure is quite
> consistant across all frames - which is probably a good thing
> to stirve for anyways.
I still take the majority of my shots on auto, I'll admit, which makes this
that bit less of an issue, hopefully. One less thing to worry about messing
up (hopefully) and once I've got everything under some sort of control
there, I'll start playing with moving the exposure between camera and
darkroom to see what that gets me.
> I also find that a darkroom light-meter helps. It's much less intuitive to
> use than a light-meter for exposing the film, but it still helps a lot at
> determining exposure.
I picked an EM-10 up recently, because I found making test strips a bit
frustrating (they work, certainly, but I'd find myself not moving the
obscuring bit of paper fast enough/etc, and winding up losing the test image
and having to start _that_ again..) so now I can just stop the lens down to
the "right" place, and while it's not perfect, it seems to get me started
that bit more easily, so I can then fiddle around from there. I'm sure
experience will make this sort of thing less necessary, but for now I'm
going to take every advantage I can get..
> You may want several strengths of magnifying. A 4x to 8x
> loupe is good for full frame. To check sharpness, use a 20x or 30x.
I've got a generic cheapy 8x at the moment, which seems to be okay for now
-- I'm holding off on buying one of the expensive high-quality ones until
I've got some more spare money saved up to do that with, because the
difference in price between what I have now ($4 or so) and the real deal is
so great..
> When I worked for Yousuf Karsh, I put my films in the 8x10
> enlarger and enlarged the whole roll to 16x20....
heh.. I was trying to work out some way to take advantage of the 6x6 hole
in the enlarger, but I can't help feeling it'll just be more trouble than
it's worth. (other than gimmicky stuff, at least)
Thanks for all the advice! I've got one roll developed that needs printing
(now to see how much I can save myself from reciprocity failure.. I
completely forgot about that when taking shots, but it's painfully obvious
what starts to happen to 4 second exposures looking at the negatives..) and
another one that I'm going to go and do some TOPE shots with at lunch, so
now I'm armed with a bunch of stuff to try.
-- dan
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