Hi Folks,

I printed my first photography tonight, and thought I would share my
experience with everyone in r.p.darkroom - it might make for good
discussion, plus people can share their tips with me for next time :)

I have been buying most of my printing and development equipment from
eBay over the last few weeks.  The printing equipment consists of a Jobo
LPL 7700 enlarger, GraLab 450 Timer, Patterson 10x8 Printing Easel and
Contact Printer, and the processing equipment is basically run of the
mill equipment - development trays, measuring graduates, tongues and
thermometers.  I am still missing three items - a darkroom timer, print
dryer and heat tray.  I bought the processing chemicals from Jessops
today and despite not having the mentioned items I thought I would
attempt to print something so I know I haven't been buying junk!

My darkroom is discretely set up permanently in my bedroom where I have
hot and cold running water, so I am pretty lucky.

The chemicals I bought are all Ilford.  I bought Multigrade, Rapid Fixer
and Multistop.  I had been a bit worried about mixing the chemicals as I
didn't know how easy it would be to get the measurements right, this
turned out to be a trivial task though and something I shouldn't have
been worried about at all.

I obtained the correct temperature by mixing hot and cold waters in the
graduates before adding the developing chemicals, which again was pretty
easy.  Once thing I did notice was that as soon as I put the fluids in
the trays the temperature starting dropping from 25F pretty quickly, so
I had to adjust my times accordingly.  This worried me because if I
wanted to spend a few hours working the temperature of the development
fluids would drop to about 14F and this is outside of the recommended
range by Ilford so I really need to find a heating tray - I know of
other ways of warming the chemicals, such as standing them in a tray of
water, but without a heater the water and thus the chemicals are going
to cool.  I presumed it dropped so quickly because of the large surface
areas of the liquids.

Last year I took a night class on photography at a collage, and most of
the work we did while in college was in the darkroom, so I knew how to
make test prints to discover the correct exposure time and filter
setting and how to actually develop the print.  At college I used a
black and white enlarger with filters in a tray. I was told to always
use a filter of "3" then adjust either way if needed.  As I have a
colour enlarger I turned all the colours down and altered the contrast
by adjusting the magenta, but I didn't know where each filter would
match up to on the colour wheel. The wheel goes from 0 to 170, so I
started with a setting of 30, which turned out to be nearly right and I
ended up using 47.

I did three prints in total, one which was a test print, one which
needed the contrast improving and a final print that I was happy with. I
need to work out how to set the borders correctly on my easel as all of
them were off, being larger at one side than the other.

The prints didn't take too much time to dry either as I said earlier, I
don't have a dryer or a drying rack so I left them propped up near the
sink and moved them around every now and then to make sure the bases of
the prints were not standing in the drained water.

All in all I was pretty pleased with myself!  I wasn't intending to
spend too much time on my first night, I just wanted to see if I could
actually do anything with all the stuff I had bought, and it turns out I
can :)

Thanks,

Andrew McCall
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Check out my blog! [ http://www.h2o.demon.co.uk/ ]
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