Large Format Once More

  I recall seeing the little room off the dining room for the first time while touring the house where I have lived for the past fifteen plus years with the real estate agent. At the time it evidently served as a sort of basic man cave. Lacking the bay window sized video screen one might associate with the more ideal sort of man cave it never the had been designed to be a place where one would want to go to take a load off at the end of a day, a Three Stooges poster on the wall dispelling any notion that this was the domain of the lady of the house. On taking ownership this became a sort of junk room, a place to put things there seemed no other place for a few years, but when I started a small photography out of the house and needed a base of operations this room was cleared out and spruced up, whereupon it became know as "The Office". Though it retained that title years after I moved on to other things professionally its role had, in reality, reverted to the same sort of man cave it was the first time I saw it, excepting for the general character of the images hanging on the wall. 

When I started giving serious thought to setting up a darkroom in which I could finally do real enlargements again I considered a few possibilities - there's the dungeon-like basement but it's far too dank, an attic but it's like a sauna in summer, and so it was that I settled on the little bathroom off the kitchen. My working space would be the area over the bathtub (that no on had used as a bathtub since we moved in). I figured I could use the tub below for print and negative washing though in practice this has become storage for larger items there seems no alternative for.. The Durst enlarger I picked up from a local ad was just about the best compromise I could come up with - as large as I could possibly make work though it does make things cramped, and though 6x6 is supposed to be its maximum it can just barely handle negatives from the RB67 with the custom carrier I made if I don\t mind losing just a smidge off the sides. With the enlarger and timer in place there's just enough room to the sides for three 8x10 trays though this is cramped at best, especially as there are a growing number of chemistry bottles competing for the space that have no other home. It can all be made to work, but it's not pleasant which to be frank is a major reason I haven't done as much printing as I had hoped by this point. 

The office never got considered in any of this because... well, it was the office. Not only that but the design of the room didn't lend itself to darkroom use, built in work surfaces were too narrow for enlargers, there is no ready access to plumbing and as if that weren't enough it had a louvred door. I would just have to find a way to make do with the space I had, perhaps by finding a way to stack trays or putting in extra shelves somewhere. 

Then came the day I stumbled across a local Kijiji ad for a well seasoned but perfectly functional Beseler 4x5 enlarger along with an array of film carriers and lenses at an affordable price. Aside from having to put up with the cramped quarters, the idea of accepting my lot and making the best of things with my tiny makeshift darkroom came with another cost - it meant that getting back to large format photography would forever be an impracticality for me. Sure my 8x10 pinhole camera should be workable since contact prints would be as large as the biggest enlargements I could do anyway, but that's a bit of a sideline for me. Meanwhile I had 4x5 equipment languishing on the shelf - a working camera and a lens which, thanks to an unexpectedly successful DIY repair once again had a working shutter, along with a full compliment of 4x5 film holders. Now here was this ad to remind me of that whole region of the photographic world, one I used to enjoy, that I was for all practical purposes excluded from for the foreseeable future. 

Then I began to think. Was there a way to section off a part of the basement that could be kept dry, clean and dark? (Answer- not without great effort... and even then.) What about a window mounted air conditioner to keep the attic cool? (Answer- not without a significant increase to my carbon footprint and electric bill.) Could I encourage my teenage son to get a place of his own so I could use his room? (Answer- legally, not for a few more years.) A week went by without a definite answer coming to me, but I could stand it no more and finally I called about the Beseler.

Too late it seemed. The seller informed me that someone had called from out of province expressing an interest. They would be through town in a couple of weeks and the seller had agreed to hold it for them. I left my contact information with them in case their potential buyer didn't go for it. I suppose I could have just shrugged it off and continued with the status quo but the seed had been sown. Maybe it would take a while but it was now set I was going to get back to large format in the darkroom.

Now if you've been following along for a while you might be asking yourself what the big deal is. After all, I must seem positively giddy at times over the medium format kit I own so why not stick with that? The truth is it's not so much the format, meaning the actual physical dimensions of the negatives, that is the big attraction for me. Don't get me wrong, I'll take the bigger negs thank ye very much, but it's really the cameras themselves that are the attraction. Like their smaller 35mm cousins, medium format cameras such as the Mamiyas and Bronicas I have are hard bodied cameras, essentially consisting of a rigid box with a lens attached to the front and film in the back so that film and lens are permanently held square on to each other. With the typical large format camera film and lens are separated by bellows which, due to their flexible nature, permits the two to be shifted and tilted with respect to each other. The whys and where-to-fores of all of this go beyond what I'm willing to delve into today, but in the end this gives the photographer controls that can be used to manipulate perspective and the plane of focus.

One example of a time I really wish I had this kind of control was when I took this shot...

This was taken with a Mamiya RB67 and to be fair it's one of my most successful images from last winter. Scale is a bit ambiguous here and I suppose one could imagine reaching that hill would require an ambitious hike but in truth I could have cleared it and then some by throwing a snowball. The nearest of those windblown dune features then is less than a metre away from the lens. Luckily the lens I used stopped all the way down to f/45 because I needed all the depth of field I could get and the foreground is still not as crisply sharp as I would have liked. That's because with a rigid bodied camera critically sharp focus occurs at a fixed distance from the lens. Imagine everything at that distance forming an imaginary wall, and this wall becomes the plane of focus. A 4x5 camera with even the most basic movements would have allowed me instead to tilt the lens and alter this plane of focus to match the lay of the land rather than that imaginary wall fixed at a certain distance from the lens. I could have stopped down less (stopping down too much actually results in less sharpness due to diffraction effects which is why selecting a middle of the road aperture setting is usually ideal) and achieved better sharpness in the foreground than what I got. 

My bedroom/darkroom circa 1993

Back to our story though it was long about this point when it occurred to me that the office was a viable alternative to the unworkable ideas I had been mulling around with. The idea wouldn't be, at least for the time being, to turn it into a complete darkroom. What I had in mind rather was returning to an idea I had used for my first bachelor pad darkroom, a separate dry room and wet room. Back then I fully blacked out the window of my bedroom (the dry room) where the ancient 4x5 enlarger I owned at the time was permanently set up. There prints were exposed, placed into a dark bag so they could be transferred to the windowless bathroom (the wet room) to be developed in trays. Not ideal to be sure but far superior to my current situation. Converting the office as the dry room and the current darkroom as only a wet room would not only allow me to devote the whole space to develop prints, it would also give me the extra storage space to clear out the bathtub underneath and use it as intended. The whole thing could be a go if I could just get my hands on the enlarger I needed.

I imagined I might have to wait some time before another suitable enlarger became available locally but even finding a bargain online could quickly turn into an expensive proposition when it came time to pay shipping on something as bulky as a 4x5 enlarger, but my luck took a turn for the better when the owner of the Beseler contacted me to say the other buyer was no longer interested. The next evening I was bringing it home. It now sits in its own space in the (former) office where it could be used as is though I'll probably need to build a proper stand for it. Today I blacked out the window and I'm about three quarters of the way to completing the installation of a solid door. I have a little way to go yet but no sense waiting, there are fresh exposures sitting in film holders even as I write, waiting to be developed.

The Darkroom Bears Fruit

The final result of my first foray back into the darkroom after an absence of two decades, warts and all. I'm sure I could do much better with this negative, but not bad for a first go. If nothing else I've learned I need to do a better job dusting.

It's a little depressing for me to think that I haven't been making darkroom prints since three or four years before the kids were born, and my oldest just turned sixteen. As my regular readers will recall (and thanks for your continued support by the way, both of you) last summer I up an old Durst M601 enlarger along with a host of related accessories and materials to set me on my way back to having a functional darkroom. Well, here we are half a year on and not much more has been heard about it. Well, here at last is a photo presented as a newly-made print from that enlarger rather than the usual negative scan.

I've presented it here in all of its glory as a straight scan, dust spots and other flaws included. The image itself isn't new, it was shot in the Autumn of 2013, a few months after I first started with the Mamiya RB67 system.I chose it because I've always liked it and because it looks best cropped square, allowing it to be printed in the Durst's stock carrier which will accommodate negatives up to 6x6. The condensers and bellows are large enough to handle full frame 6x7 negatives but unless I'm mistaken there's no carrier available in this size. I'm also just not keen on the glass sandwich design of the stock carrier. It's clever, with a four bladed mask that can adjust for any film size up to its maximum, but the glass means more surfaces to attract dust, I'll probably have to see what I can come up with on my own.This enlarger may be the subject of several DIY projects before I'm through.

Having been away from it for nearly twenty years I didn't head in to the darkroom expecting to produce anything gallery worthy. It was more a shakedown run where I hoped to find out whether I had lost much over the years or if darkroom skills were more like the proverbial ability to ride a bike. The result, I'd say, is not bad but I don't feel what I've achieved could in any way be considered the definitive print from this negative. I'm sure I'll return to it again and I'll do better next time.

The reasons this all has been so long in coming are several, though I must admit a fair share of the blame lies with the fact I've been comfortable with the groove of scanning all my negatives and doing all my "darkroom" work in Photoshop for presentation here an elsewhere on the web. Though everything I do when I work this way has its equivalent in the darkroom - exposure and contrast adjustments, dodging and burning, toning and spotting - I've also been anxious about my ability to achieve the same level of fine control under the enlarger. There is no undo button in the darkroom. The other thing that's been keeping me from diving right in is the fact that my equipment haul did not include everything I consider a necessity, and it was only last week with the arrival of a simple but serviceable enlarger timer that I finally had the last must-have crossed off the check list.

That's the check list for a basic level of function, but you can bet that's not the end of it. My next priority will be getting back to printing on fiber based paper followed eventually, I hope, by carbon transfer printing (not to be confused with carbon inkjet printing). That will probably be a long way off. For now I just want to get comfortable working under the enlarger and see how things go from there. As always I'll keep you posted.

Vintage Bonanza

I've mentioned a time or two that the one gaping hole in my partially functional darkroom has been an enlarger I lacked. Online auctions may be great for cameras and lenses and such, but shipping charges alone would exceed the budget I could allow for an enlarger no matter what sort of bargain I might be able to find. A search through the local online classifieds turned up slim pickings, usually a lot here and there of unspecified darkroom "stuff" that might include a rickety entry-level 35mm enlarger, but I figured if I waited long enough something would eventually turn up. A few days ago it did. 

The ad seemed much like all the others, just a complete darkroom setup, no photos, no list, contact for details. I don't even know what prompted me to inquire, but the next day the news from the seller arrived in my inbox that the lot included a Durst M601 enlarger, a model that would afford the near perfect balance between capability (it won't quite handle the full 6x7 frame of my RB, but heck, I usually crop square anyway) and size in the teeny darkroom space I have. That was all I needed to know. Apparently some other stuff was included too.

My primary target, The Durst M601, in its new still very unfinished home.  

The lot had been kept in a blue storage trunk (included) of sufficient size to contain a medium sized adult provided they were willing to endure physical discomforts exceeding those experienced by coach passengers. Inside was the enlarger which was in fine condition excepting for a portion of the gear teeth on column rail which create a dead spot at a certain height when cranking the head up and down. It included a 50mm and a 75mm Schneider lens which I'd say is at the high end of reasonable expectations. Then there was the expected - the obligatory trio of 8x10 developing trays, safe-light (though there were two of these), film tanks (though there were three of these), printing easel and a packet of D-76 powder. 

Then a few unexpected items began to emerge. First was the print dryer, not the most common darkroom item to be found but a sweet bonus for any printer who, like me, loves the look of a print on premium fiber based paper but the tendency to curl up into a cylinder not so much. 

Even before the digital age I wonder how many photographers would have known what this thing even is.

Then the film started to appear. At first it was the four bright yellow boxes, rolls of Kodak Plus X, a film that perhaps I didn't show enough appreciation for before it was discontinued a few years ago and had been hoping for one last chance to use. These rolls were hardly end of the line though; the freshest of the four had expired int 1982. This was followed by a larger yellow box, a 100ft bulk roll of the same stuff (develop by 09/79), a round metal tin bearing the old Ilford sunburst logo containing 100ft of FP4. (FP4 Plus is one of the films I use today, but this stuff is the nonplussed version.) Finally there was an even larger round metal tin of the sort that looks like it contains a movie reel. (And I suspect it well might, we'll find out when we get it open in the dark.) This contains 1000' of Ilford Mark V, a cinematic film I've never heard of. It's 35mm like all the rest of it though, we'll just have to experiment a bit to figure out how to use it to best advantage. All told then that's 1200 feet of film not including the bit that's in one of the bulk film loaders. (Did I mention there were also two bulk film loaders? Sorry. There were also two bulk film loaders.) That's over 1/3 of a kilometre of 35mm film. If it's any good after all those decades my Nikons just might feel loved again. 

Large format isn't totally neglected though. There was also a box, apparently of similar vintage, of FP4 in 4-3/4" x 6-1/2" sheets, so now I just need to pick up a few 4-3/4" x 6-1/2" film holders and I'm off to the races. They carry those at Walmart I think.

Just the perfect size to fall right out of a 5x7 film holder.

Along the way there had been paper. Ilfobrom paper, Panalure F paper, Kentmere paper, pretty much all of it 8x10. Down at the bottom though, the very bottom there was a garbage bag of something resting in what turned out to be three 16.x20 trays nested togther. In the garbage bag was of course 16x20 paper. 

This isn't even all of it. The question is what am I going to do with it? How am I supposed to print on this stuff? My darkroom is a glorified closet.