Three things:
- Don’t wait for the perfect darkroom
- Let the process pan out before you decide you stuffed it up
- Every photograph is different
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| Andre, Kurilpa Bridge (Image: R.Crapnell, Ilford HP5 f8 1/125) |
The moment I opened the envelope containing lab-developed
prints from my first roll of Kodak Gold, I knew that I wanted to master the
process of capturing, processing and enlarging images for myself. After almost
a year, I have finally managed to print a legible photograph from a roll of
film I shot and developed myself.
Of course, banging out a low contrast, badly focused and
misaligned image falls some way short of “mastering”, but I was still rather
proud of myself.
I have been developing my own black and white film for
almost a year now, and we had hoped to start printing shortly after we moved
into the studio. Alas, the darkroom in the studio had troublesome plumbing and
never really came up to scratch. Over the last couple of months I managed to
scrape together the necessities of a basic dark room; medium format enlarger, trays,
chemicals, paper and all the other bits and pieces. The only thing missing was
the dark room itself.
Finally, I decided to just do it and contrived a cheap and
nasty black-out kit for my kitchen and set up the gear. With my downloaded
guide to printing black and white photos memorized, I turned out the lights and
did my first test strip on the Durst C35 enlarger. I ran through the two second
test exposure segments before dropping the print into the developer bath and
hoping. In the glow of the safelight, my heart sunk as it appeared to me that
the print showed as far too dark across the whole image.
Already thinking about how I should adjust the enlarger, I
went through the stop and fix process just for the practice and plopped the
print into the rinse. Flicking on the main light, I thumbed through the
enlarger manual to see how I could dial down the exposure. But when I turned
back to the rinse, the photograph floating there showed a nice clear set of
exposure gradations.
I chose four seconds as the best time, and ran through the
print process for real. The end result was a badly focused, low-contrast and
crooked image that brought a lump to my throat and now sits on the first page
of my new photo album. Three other photos quickly followed, one of which was my
long awaited first image from my Pentax 67.
I learned three things from this effort. The first was, of
course, that I should not have waited for the perfect dark room setup before I
started printing photographs. I wasted months hung up by some dodgy plumbing
while all I needed to do was tape up a window, hang a black out curtain and
wait for the sun to go down.
The second was that while film developing is an exacting
art, it is not an exact science. Running that test strip through, I was ready
to search for a solution to a non-existent problem rather than just wait for
things to pan out. I will keep a notebook handy and try to capture all of these
little quirks as they happen.
Third is that every printed photograph is an individual
image with its own quirks. My first fumbling attempts at dodging and burning
showed that the film negative is just a template (yeah, obvious, but it took a
while for me to figure it out) from which many interpretations of an image can
be made, and no two of those interpretations will be the same.
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