Red lights

Right then, time for another post folks.

This week...... THE DARKROOM.

I just spent my weekend in the Double Negative Darkrooms learning how to wet print black and white photo's.

I have been waiting to learn how to print for a very long time now. Now film processing I can do, as my long suffering kitchen will gladly tell you but after that I have always had to head for the scanner.
You can get some very nice results from the scanner. Even more so if you happen to have a super expensive professional lab scanner. But you just don't get the depth and shadows that you do from real wet printing.

Soooooooo.....

Saturday was spent learning how to process the film (yes I already knew how to do this but it was nice to do it in a dark room instead of a changing bag :) and then on to test strips and contact sheet printing.
From there it was onto the main printing and learning about filter grades and focusing the print. Then home for a little sleep and back on Sunday for a full day of printing, dodging and burning and anything else we fancied trying.

It was a great experience and if you have ever wanted to print your own photo's I highly recommend you do it. Seeing your image as it starts to appear in the developer is an amazing feeling. Then taking it back to the dark room and figuring out how you are going to tweak the print with extra exposure time, dodging parts and burning others. 10 seconds here, 3 there while dodging that little bit there and then wait for the results in the developer tray. Fun stuff.
It really dose make you think about the whole process allot more. And it is 100 times more satisfying when you end up with a print you are happy with than if you had done it in Photoshop.

Here are a few scans from the weekend and yes, that is another hawk photo.
(the scanner has darkened them a bit too much but hey)

This was on a roll of 120 that I shot in my Fuji 645 but sadly there had been a major light leak somewhere so the top half of the print is a bit washed out.

I really liked my son's pose in this shot and it was proving super easy to print. Too easy! I did another print after this one with the sky burned in but it revealed a water mark on the neg and I had to send it back to the wash. So this one will have to wait for another day.

This is my favourite print of the weekend, a crop from a 645 neg.

I shot this on Walthamstow marsh one sunny summers day with my kids (same day as the photo above actually). The hawk sat there for so long while I took the shots that I could not believe it. Until I realised that we had been standing over a dead mouse aka HIS LUNCH! and he was not looking to part with it.