The Bathroom Darkroom

A lot more was shot than was printed. One of the first things you’ll notice about shooting film and printing in a darkroom instead of scanning negatives is that you don’t wind up with as many prints to show. We’re going the full-blown wet darkroom route, so the only time we have anything to publish is after prints have dried. We don’t own a film scanner and that’s not planned. I do plan to try my hand at digitally photographing negatives using a Nikon bellows and slide copy attachment, but they’re still in their boxes.

Another reason for the meager few images in this post is that 2013 was our first darkroom summer and we were just getting organized. These are all scans of wet prints from the enlarger and developing tray. They aren’t as sharp here as in real life; I’ve discovered that my Canon MF4370dn multifunction printer with its flatbed scanner, regardless of how I press the print into the glass, doesn’t produce an image as sharp as the print.  That holds true with fiber matte and glossy RC paper. I might try photographing the prints with a digital camera on a copy stand over the vacuum easel to see if that helps, but that will take a while based on where it is on my to-do list. I hope the slide copier negative photographing route works for obvious reasons. I read a theory that there are so many bellows and copy attachments on the Bay because of the amount of time “scanning” takes using them, but I’ll have to learn the hard way.

Print scans were straightened and cropped in Photoshop and exported from Lightroom, but only adjusted to look as close as possible on a calibrated monitor to the paper prints. Adjustments on these were only increasing the black level that went too light during scanning. The actual prints are borderless, made on a DIY vacuum easel that I’ll write about soon sometime. Borders are from WordPress, left in place for some separation between page and image.

Dad is rarely in vacation photos as is the case in this Bethany Beach, DE shot of the girls lounging at the shore. This was shot on Polypan F at ASA 50 in a Kodak Instamatic 500. The camera is all manual except for a selenium cell light meter, so a natural for shooting film speeds that weren’t native to 126 cartridges.  This is also a terrible example of what Polypan can do, by the way, so don’t let that scare you away from trying the film. I write this off to it being one of my first rolls and first times using Adonal (Rodinal) and way more grainy that it should have been. Technique, technique, technique… Immediately after taking the film out of the Adonal I thought I’d botched the whole roll because I hadn’t wound the film far enough between images. I was shooting one dark exposure between frames but should have used two. This landmark image was salvageable. I’ve since decided to use the backing paper as a frame counter, but make sure to wind three frames if you shoot it without it. While on the backing paper topic, I suggest it because I’ve had some nasty scratches from burs left from cassette opening, and the paper will serve as an insulator in addition to a frame counter.

Something else shooting with cameras that think does is make one a very sloppy photographer by relieving one of that responsibility.  The Instamatic 500 has a viewfinder, but not a rangefinder.  Remembering to manually set distance with it was a bit hard to reacclimate to and quite a few frames had blown focus.

I hear some of you objecting with, “But our auto-everything cameras give us more time to be creative.”  We didn’t just start turning out great photographs when we got automation, did we?  We had to be creative then, and that included setting our own focus and our own exposure.  We had to be even more creative to nail “wow” images then.  Don’t believe me?  Go to Sports Illustrated photographer Neil Leifer’s site and look at his images.  Neil used his wits for these iconic images, not auto-everything.  Read Larry Berman’s 2002 interview with Neil to get a better insight into Neil’s photographic genius.

We got a cool image out of the roll, though. The banding at left is the frame overlap that we covered up a bit with burning in while printing, but I kind of like it this way. It screams WE DID THIS OURSELVES! Hey – this is art, and fun; not stock for Magnum.  Oh, the horizon is also a little tilted; not something you want in a print to hang, compete or sell, but I missed it on the easel and am not going to go back and reprint it for that.

The little specs that look like dust? They’re dust. Let this be a lesson to you that you have to be meticulously clean in the darkroom to make this all work. The only healing brush or clone stamp comes in the form of a tiny retouch brush and spotting dye, and you probably don’t want to start with that. Think wet darkroom is a time-consuming craft? Try print spotting.

Our Deep Creek Lake, MD getaway was a nice opportunity for Addison to shoot.  No grand architecture, but a boat dock, her dog, her Nikkormat and some HP5. Berkley the dog cooperated by lounging on the pier for some puppy portrait practice. Note the proper grip on the camera.

Berkley’s portrait  is tack sharp in the print, which is the photo that made the scanner’s weakness perfectly clear. Metering was from her hand as a gray card, then opened up a stop, I think, so Berkley wouldn’t go black. I was amazed at the negative and its print. Xtol was the film developer and Formulary’s BW-65 did the print on Adorama fiber matte paper. Ultrafine Plus 400 developed in Xtol.

Two daughters – one at home in front of the lens; the other behind it. That just works out.

My model and a friend. Polypan F straight into the sun. That’s brutal for any film or sensor, but film without antihalation backing? BEAUTIFUL! Metered Ally’s face close-up with the F2’s meter and went with it. I’d like to have a comparison negative with standard camera film to see the difference in the glow.

AUGUST 2015 UPDATE – I went through the negatives, photographed each with a bellows and micro lens on a digital camera body, pulled the best ones and created a NEW AUGUST JAM GALLERY for your reminiscing pleasure or anthropological research.  

The photos below are scans of actual paper prints I made in the darkroom in 1974; the new gallery uses those same 1974-vintage 35mm negatives converted to digital and enhanced a little in Lightroom and occasionally Photoshop. The new phrase is “hybrid workflow”, which usually starts with a film negative and ends with a digital image ready for printing or online display. Aspiring and seasoned film photographers may want to explore hybrid because it can speed the process of getting work online if that’s its final destination. It allows for creativity impossible under an enlarger, like compositing multiple negatives into one print. I can’t compare the quality of negatives scanned on a consumer-grade flatbed scanner and those photographed with a quality macrography lens (55mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor in this case), but I have no desire for a scanner after seeing how quickly and accurately I can digitize negatives this way.

A manual LumoPro LP160 flash fires through its wide-angle diffuser, a sheet of frosted lexan to get the most even light I can, the slide copier’s diffuser, negative, bellows-mounted micro lens and onto the camera’s sensor. The photo below was shot on Eastman 2238 separation film at ASA 12 and processed in Xtol stock for 9 minutes at 68 degrees. The dried negative was photographed at ISO 100 with the flash at 1/16th power and lens at f/16, though I probably need to reshoot this and the concert at a wider aperture to keep down potential diffraction. I kept the histogram hugging the right without clipping the highlights, just like with regular digital photography. The great thing about hybrid is that a photo editing program can be used to make final adjustments.

 

Welcome to those of you who got here by way of either BathroomDarkroom.com, our film photography chronicle-ette (it hasn’t become as expansive as in my original vision), or AugustJam.com, the new URL that points to this post that has become way more popular than its parent site. Maybe you read about the photos in Larry’s Look at the August Jam or watched his commemorative video and started searching. Maybe you just punched in the Jam to see what’s out here.  However you got here, I’m glad you made it and hope you enjoy your stay. People who only want to look at photos of the 1974 concert they remember – or sort of remember – can skip all the text and scroll straight there; those not quite sure will want to read a little further.

By way of quick introduction to myself, this site and the concert that brought us all here, I was a 15-year-old aspiring pro photographer in 1974 and blessed to get backstage with a camera at what NBC’s Larry Sprinkle called “the Carolinas’ version of Woodstock”. Decades later, our 15-year-old daughter asked if I’d teach her film photography.  I put together BathroomDarkroom.com to chronicle a little of what we did. That started me looking through my expando-folder of old prints from my home darkroom in my parents’ house, which turned up quite a few from that bewildering event. The natural thing to do was to write this post for aspiring film photographers and talk about what happens when darkroom technique is below par and prints start to show their age years down the road. That , it turned out, was just the start…

There aren’t a lot of August Jam photos online so these started coming up in searches by those of us who happened to remember it and wanted to step back forty years in time; sort of like poking around to see what’s become of an old high school or college flame… Ya’ll were kind enough to leave some comments to let me know that I had connected with at least a few of you, which is way more than I expected.

My ego got its biggest boost, though, (frankly – it’s one of the things that keeps photographers photographing) when I got a call from Larry, who told me that it was the Jam’s 40th anniversary, that he was putting together a video segment to commemorate it, and asked to use some of my photos. I happened to be standing on the somewhat remote beach sand of Kill Devil Hills, NC (OBX for you Marylanders) when the phone rang, but through the miracle of Kodak film technology from decades ago, a CrashPlan online backup of the scans for the site, a WiFi hotspot from my phone and the blessing of having our photographer-daughter’s PC with Photoshop back at the beach house, I was able to get high-resolution files to Larry that night.

Larry did even more magic by tracking down 40-year-old video straight from the bands, with Reuben Wallace editing it all down to a great three and a half minute video that you can watch here. The fact that bands were able to deliver digitized 16mm video from so long ago, so quickly, is itself amazing. A big salute to all of you techies for dropping whatever you dropped to get the clips out to Larry. This video is quite a news reel of one little part of the history of North Carolina and Rock ‘n’ Roll, and I’m honored that Larry tracked me down for some of the weekend’s photos. My mid-70’s high school mornings were filled with Larry as the voices of Big Olllllle Funky WAYS (nod to Chuckie Boo Baron) and WROQ radio stations’ maintenance man Hubert “That pigeon’s probably miles from here by now” Gleason, Myers Park aristocrat Parker Myers, Big E(lvis), Brother Bill Taker of the Pass The Loot Club and countless others from as far away as Sic Syk Lee Street and Battlestar Gastonia.  Thanks, too, Mister Murry. Uh, Mister Murphy.  That’s Robert Murphy in the Morning to the rest of us.

Had the concert been today, I’d have taken thousands of digital photos instead of 200-250 film photos. Hard to believe I shot that few rolls, but we amateurs didn’t think in terms of thousands of images back then, and buying twice what I figured I’d need wasn’t in the budget. I’d expose more film than that during a World 600 stock car race at that same track, but I knew what to expect from them. I obviously didn’t realize what kind of history I was walking into that August weekend. Some of the NASCAR Photos might find their way into another article.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled post

This is a great example of what came out of my bathroom darkroom in 1974.  It’s fun pulling out old prints to look at, scan and put online for the two or three of you reading this the way more than two of three good enough to stop by.

This concert was one of my early big-time shoots.  It was concert promoter Stan Kaplan (Kaleidoscope Productions, WAYS and WROQ radio stations), with wife Sis’s money so the story goes, who thought that Charlotte needed to host an outdoor concert after the success of the California Jam in April of that year.  I’ve seen stats from various sources including an August 29 Wilmington (NC) Star News article that say 50,000 people were expected, but the actual was closer to four or five times that.  Dad told me that a lot of the tackled gate crashers on Friday night before the Saturday show actually had tickets!  They tore down a double perimeter of chain link fence, trampled two guard dogs and generally destroyed the infield in preparation for the Saturday show.

My gear was a Yashica TL Electro-X with a few high-dollar (to a 15-year-old) lenses, including the Vivitar 90-230mm f/4.5 T4-mount zoom, a long but soft Pro (Ritz Camera’s house brand, similar to Spiratone and others) 400mm f/6.3 and a 50mm 1.7 (I think) Yashinon that came with the body.  Film was Plus-X for the daytime acts, with ELP, night scenes, Charlotte Police helicopter Snoopy, and the dense crowd shots on Tri-X. No idea what effect the steadily high contaminant level in the air had on film or photographer.  I remember this constant urge for a Snickers, though.  The two were probably unrelated.

I originally scanned these original 5×7 prints from 1974 as B&W, but that didn’t show the aging aspect of their character, so I rescanned them as color.  The print tones are the best indicator I can think of for what must have been a less-than-archival washing practice years ago, or maybe that I was washing in good tasting but mineral rich well water.  These were all stored in the dark.

I’ll narrate the photos later, but here they are for now.  See who you recognize – and clap for the Wolfman…

 

So how did a 15-year-old kid get backstage at a major event like this? It’s all in who you know. Dad worked part-time race security for Dave Suddreth, who ran either infield security or the entirety of security at the track. Mr. Suddreth asked him to work the concert for what I believe was $10.00 an hour. I heard another security guy ask my dad what time it was. Dad looked at his watch and said, “$35.00”. What does a loving dad with a camera-junkie son do when he has a chance to make pretty good moonlighting money for 1974 checking credentials at a gate at a rock concert that he has less than no interest hearing – or smelling? He does it, of course, and makes sure that the stage gate guards know that his kid is there and asks them to please let him come and go.

I was in heaven. Bulk-loaded film in the bag, a cooler full of sandwiches in Dad’s car that I had no idea would be so hard to get to, and the run of the fenced-off area backstage (the track’s pit and garage areas) and from the stage out to the mixing tower. I would later own 8-track tapes from some of these bands, but I didn’t have a car yet so no need. The Eagles stiffed the concert and no-showed. Better than listening to the bands for me, though, was photographing them.

Check out this link to a video of Black Oak Arkansas’ rendition of Dixie from the August Jam that just happens to be the one during which I made the next five images. Watching that for the first time was like stepping through the Time Tunnel back to ’74. I thought I might even see myself in the mixing tower aisle, but alas… I wasn’t exactly what the videographers were looking for. I did, however, see the exact moment I made the image of Jim Dandy raising the flag!  Look at 3:22 into the video; mic in his left hand, flag in his right and the flag, just for a second, blowing over his left shoulder. I didn’t see that the first few times through the tape. I was showing the video to Addison when I connected the dots. She got to see exactly where Dad was and what he was doing almost 40 years ago, verified with a doubleweight mat print in hand and video on the screen. How often do those family moments come along? It would have been more daughter-safe had it been a Broadway musical, but to borrow a phrase from Forrest Gump’s mom, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

There happened to be two prints of this same frame of Jim Dandy in the accordion file, one yellowed and one nearly mint. Same well-water and probably the same printing session. Wash time and/or prints sticking together in the wash tray are all I can attribute the difference to because the yellowing includes borders. Hypo-clear (which I never did in the day) and watch your wash time!

That’s all the rambling for now. Leave a comment if you were there or think that you might have been. Support the bands and buy some of their music!

Alan