FogBlog: January 2023

Q: Got a ton of old negatives that you have not a clue what to do with and you're worried about the Cost Of Living Crisis and energy coasts?

A: Get yourself a darkroom - simple as that.

Morning folks - you know it says something when the darkroom is the warmest room in the house, but this Winter this is proving to be the case - jings, even Olive Oil solidified in our kitchen!

But it is very different in the darkroom - I can snuggle up tight in there, heating myself with nothing more than a constant temperature (it used to be a wine cellar); the intermittent use of a 250W bulb; one 15W safelight and the white heat of creativity 😎.

It works a treat.

Grey days drift away in a flurry of activity lit red.

Ice on the windows?

No problem, hunker down in the darkroom and learn.

Sun not risen at all today?

Take up thy fixer and walk (or kneel in my case).

© Phil Rogers Dundee, Monochrome Printing, Darkroom, Ilford, Foma,Black And White Printing,Craft,Kodak Selenium Toner,Secol Archival Sleeves

5x4" Negative,
Fomabrom Variant 111, Kodak Selenium,
Adox Neutol NE Developer

Regular readers will know that when I was a young man, pretty much what I wanted to do with life was print.

Regular readers will also know that what happened was not what I expected and economic circumstance led to an entirely different path.

Well, with a change in life circumstances, that has now changed.

I can print . . and not only that, but I can print what I want and when I want to.

It's marvellous.

Various 9.5 x 12" prints in Secol sleeves

To that end, and as mentioned recently, I have tried to standardise an archive, and it wasn't the easiest matter.

The problem hit me when I (after much faffing and measuring) printed an 8x8" image from my Hasselblad on 9.5x12" paper.

I was, to coin a phrase, knocked out.

It wasn't so much the sheer image size, but more the print now gave real presence to the Zeiss lens.

I hadn't been expecting this, after all I had printed on 9.5 x 12" paper before, but this was something else.

I repeated the exercise with the Rollei T's Tessar, and the Minoltor Autocord's Rokkor, and whilst they were good (really good at times) neither had the sheer grit, micro-detail and subtle greys of the Distagons and Sonnars, and Biogon.

I then repeated the exercise with images from my Large Format lenses.

To say this was a revelation is a bit of an understatement.

A 5x4" negative printed on bigger paper with a decent border is a thing to behold.

I have to precursor that though, with the following:

Up till now, my LF enlarging lens has been a nice 80's-ish 150mm Rodenstock Rodagon.

It's been fine (despite the obvious scuffs on the front and the back - the latter I believe robbing me of a decent amount of quality) but always left me with an itch I really wanted to scratch.

To my eyes, every print I have ever made from a 5x4" with the Rodagon has just not had the chutzpah you're supposed to get with Large Format photography.

The lens was effectively free with my DeVere (God Bless Mr. MXV, wherever you are) and I always just accepted that (as has been written many times) MF and even 35mm lenses produce 'sharper' results than LF.

Hmmm, well . . . he said stroking his chin.

I was having a butchers at enlarging lenses on Ebay one day, and, because I believe a lowly 100mm Vivitar is the best enlarging lens I have ever owned (yes, over Leitz and Rodenstock, Durst and Nikon) I came across a 135mm one . . for £32.

That's not even a brainstorming, sick-on-the-pavement night in the pub these days, so I thought why not.

And indeed the thing was a complete revelation.

All the micro-detail, subtle grey nuances and "overall bollocks" (that's a technical term - look it up - it's in "The Negative" . . page 134) that I'd always thought were there on the negatives, were indeed there, but now writ large on big paper.

Oh boy was I a happy bunny.

And what, you might well be asking yourself, is the big paper?

Well for 'economical' purposes I decided to get 50 sheets of Ilford MGFB and a 10 sheet sample box of Foma 111.

Why Ilford?

Well, the colour head mixing settings for different grades are the same as Kentmere RC (and I had a box of that) so I am not having to slice up expensive fibre paper to make test strips and overall, I would say things match up very well.

As for Foma, I have never used it before and I have to say I shall be using it again, which is weird because I am not really a fan of their films.

The paper though has a different look to Ilford.

Its surface reminds me more of the sheen on Forte's Polywarmtone which I always loved. AND it looks like Fomabrom and Fomaspeed (the RC version) use the same emulsion, so I can use RC for test strips.

OK Sheepy, wtf about dry-down etc, how can you possibly judge things?

Well, it is a complex matter, that, dare I say might well have been over-egged over the years.

If you read around, dry down is a relatively strange thing, running from shifts in the darkest tones (Ansel's "thud") of a print due to: wet prints vs dry prints; heat drying; malevolent forces; changes in emulsion; alien interference etc etc - told you it was complex.

I always air-dry my prints and have to say I have never noticed any really significant darkening of images and that is over decades of printing. Sure there is a small (as in tiny) amount, but to say this impacts on the quality of the print, is hair-splittingly hairiness of the hairy kind.

A lot of people have said it is commensurate with heat drying and I can see how that might affect things, but I don't heat dry.

Air Drying -secondhand caravan clothes line and plastic pegs!
Left and Right, Ilford Pinned Back To Back method.
Centre, Sheephouse "'Ang It From The Corner Missus" Method

It's also probably anathema to all the cloak-wearing darkroom wizards out there about using RC paper to make a printing judgement for FB paper, but it can be done.

The greatest printer I ever knew was Joseph McKenzie, and he could make an exposure/grade judgment call just by looking at a negative. That ability came from thousands of hours spent printing; in other words experience.

I'm sure the likes of Robin Bell and all the Master Printers out there, doing this for a living can work in the same way too.

For me, I don't have their eyes, so I will decide on my Grade (which as a starting point is nearly always Grade 3 these days) hack up a bit of RC, whack it on the weasel, expose in 4 second increments, whack it in the developer, develop for most of the proper time, give it a wiggle in the stop, whack it in the fix, and slap the lights on after about 15 seconds.

I can generally make a decent judgement call from this.

You see, although printing is a relatively easy process defined by care, as in:

You have all the ingredients (assuming you have a decent negative) to make an impressive print.

You have all the ingredients (assuming you have a decent negative) to make a dog's dinner.

The darkroom is the GREAT LEVELLER.

That sounds like the name of the horned bloke from 'Legend' or, more to my taste, the name of the horned bloke from Tenacious D's "The Greatest Song In The World".

Why the Great Leveller?

Because everyone is using pretty much exactly the same stuff, from exhibitions hanging in MOMA, to a couple of prints stuck up in a local cafe.

The difference between famine and feast is your care as a printer.

You have to be precise and consistent.

You have to take care with each stage (yeah I know what I wrote above about my test strips, but I can say that because I have been doing this for a long time).

But the thing is, printing ISN'T rocket science.

It's a craft skill, like crochet or knitting and anyone can learn a craft skill.

It truly is an egalitarian process.

And whilst these days it is considered to be a luxury craft skill, and boy can it be frustrating when you make mistakes with a sheet of paper costing a couple of quid, on the whole, it is FUN.

And educational.

And, I believe, life-enhancing.

It improves you as a human being, because the care you take in the darkroom, can lend itself to run and rummel of every day life too.

The precision, order and concentration rub off.

They really do!

But that is me heading on another of my Sheephousian metaphysical borrocks convos, and we don't want to go there.

So, to round out, here's some straight scans of recent stuff, printed whilst ice formed on the inside of my house's windows, grey skies cemented themselves onto the general milieu of the British psyche and people started another year in a great state of flux and doubt.

If that phrase applies to you, I am sorry - things will get better, just trust that.