Get Mixing

[Dan Cattermole]

This is a picture of the sound engineer at one of the my latest gigs I attended in Nottingham.

I went round to KK's last night and had the 'pleasure' in spending some 'quality' time in his 'darkroom'

On a serious note now....... lol. I had my negs scanned and was very delighted when 'excited' (serious I said!!) when he offered to show my the process of analogue printing.... In this case I'd NEVER experienced or participated in, in my existance!!
Guy's... Kev hasn't got the top dog of dark rooms, no mod cons or expensive gear, or anything near the lines of 'Pete pro' kit. However, what he has is magic!! For the first time I'd witnessed one of MY prints appear on a sheet of paper. The anticipation and procees is astonishing!! And what I find great is the pride that Kev has with his basic, yet very effective dark room.
I learned how just 2 seconds can have a significant impact on developing.

Anyway, this is the scanned version cropped to a square with slight exposure adjustment. (which I will cut the analogue print to a square crop like this) and FRAME IT!!!!!!

And this one is where the magic happened!

Thanks again Kev..... Much appreciated

Thanks ofr looking

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Awesome - sounds like you two had a great time playing in the dark together!

 

[Dan Cattermole]

Ha!! We certainly did!

 

[Kev Pugh]

Cheers DD was a good night, and always welcome this was a rather quick print, Just so peeps know, it was printed on Ilford Pearl 10 x 8, dev in Ilfosol 18 seconds @f5.6

 

[Pete Askew]

Nice Dan and good to see the print too. There really is something quite magical about watching a print emerge for the first time isn't there? Whenever I teach someone to print (which I haven't done for a few years now) I always use the full manual process (even though for everyday prints I use RC paper and a print processor) so they experience it. But only the once. As I always process standard FB paper face down when using trays - a habit acquired when taught myself by a highly accomplished technical photographer decades ago.

I know I have a fairly fancy darkroom set-up (i used so may terrible darkrooms when I worked for someone else that I promised myself I would fix all the things that used to annoy me when I built my own) but this is really not necessary to produce good prints. I remember seeing a picture of a darkroom used by Eddy Ephraums for his Dartmoor pictures. Primitive would be one word (shed old bath and rickety table), but the images he produced in it were sublime. And have a look at some of these!!

http://www.richardnicholson.com/projects/analog---last-one-out/

Look forward to see some more examples Dan / Kev.

 

[Dan Cattermole]

Thanks Pete!
There's some great bits of kit on that link isn't there? (not that I know what I'm talking about) but it looks pretty nifty.
It is magical pete, I've never seen it before. only on the t.v, and even then it was only the dark room..... with the red light.

Speaking of red light, I know that your going to know the answer to this one Pete, why is it that the 'red light' doesn't affect black and white analogue printing? what is it that doesn't affect the process? is that magic also?!?! lol

Kev, I reckon you should post a piccie of your studio and put all these to shame!

 

[Pete Askew]

Spectral sensitivity Dan. The filter cuts out the light that the paper is sensitive to (ie, everything below a certain frequency). As an example, the safelight for Ilford Multigrade is brown / amber not red (although red is OK for shortish exposures) and for some lith materials it is green (I have switchable brown / green safe-lighting in the UK darkroom but amber / brown only in Germany). Colour paper is sensitive to a much wide spectral frequency and so you need to handle it either in complete darkness or using a very narrow wavelength safelight.

 

[Dan Cattermole]

Wow! Everyday is a school day on here! Thanks a bunch for that explaination pete.
I knew you'd have the answer under your belt.