Beach Week North 2016

It’s Beach Week. That means entirely different things to us when we’re kids and after we become parents. My wife was talking with someone who grew uo Florida who didn’t know what Beach Week was all about in the non-Floridian parts of the coast – they said it’s because Every Week in Florida is Beach Week.

Many of us East Coast parents did Beach Week after High School, which is why we have serious second thoughts about letting our own kids – especially our daughters – go. We’re getting ready to send a lot of them them off to college, though, and if we can’t trust them at the beach, can we let them out of our sight to go to some institute of higher learning where a party is as easy to find as a text book?

The plan? She goes to Ocean City with some kids who stand a chance of keeping each other in check, and whose parents we know – and Mom, younger sister and I go a bit north to Bethany Beach and stay in a beautiful house a block back from the shore that some dear friends were gracious enough to offer. Not keeping tabs, but close enough by that we can be in OC in under an hour. A fair compromise? I think so. Mom had a lot of office work to do, and I had 1) a lot of film that needed to be shot and 2) my beautiful younger daughter and model who was looking for a week at the beach because it wasn’t fair for sister to have all the fun.

Some Polypan @ ASA 100 during the day, and some old grainy Ultrafine 400 Plus (so old it wasn’t the Extreme branded stuff) for when it got on in the evening, a trusty Nikon F2, a yellow filter, and we’re off. A little sunning and a lot of photographing.

More of our images are here for your enjoyment. I didn’t do much of a job tagging these, but the file name tells you whether the photo was made on Polypan or Ultrafine 400 Plus.

What We Shot on our 2013 Summer Vacation

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.

Polypan f rodinal adonal bathroom darkroom print film enlarging paper

More Inspiration and Resources

Looking for even more inspiration than you’ll possibly find here at Bathroom Darkroom?  There are resources online that boggle the mind.  With information and inspiration like this at our fingertips, this Internet thing might take off after all.  Here are some that I’ve found helpful during my journey back into film; some new and some decades old.

Step 1. Tune in to the Film Photography Podcast hosted by Michael Raso!  Whether you’re getting into – or back into – film, whether large format, medium format, 35mm, instant, pinhole, subminiature or whatever, you’ll be sucked into the 90+ back episodes and the Film Photography Project site.  Michael’s co-hosts and guests include

The FPP is all about keeping the fun in making images on film.  I found out about the Project (Arlo might call it a movement) last year, coincidentally enough, either just before or just after I started building our bathroom darkroom.  I listened to a lot of the backlog while building vacuum easel, dry side surface, wet rack and film slitters, and developing and printing our first work.

Inside Analog Photo Radio is another podcast, once hosted by Scott Sheppard but sadly no longer in production, that features interviews with the people who shaped modern film photography. Scott interviews film industry legends like Ron Mowrey and Robert Shanebrook, formerly of Kodak during film’s heyday, and others instrumental in bringing analog photography to its highly refined state that digital photographers are busy trying to emulate.

Curious about the history of our craft?  Though nowhere near as irreverent as the gang at the FPP, Jeff Curto’s archive of his History of Photography college course is a must-listen.  Jeff is Professor of photography at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and takes listeners through major events and people that invented and shaped our ability to record light on film – way before there was film.  Jeff has also improved his sound quality a lot from the class series I listened to last year.

Lots of experts hang out in the Analog Photography User Group (APUG) forum.  Here you’ll find ideas and help with everything from forcing your Instamatic to eat 35mm film to salvaging 70’s Tri-X from the fog monster to staining developers, scanners and stand development.  Former Eastman Kodak great Ron Mowrey, who invented – and still invents – a lot of the chemistry we use today, is a contributor.  You’ll even notice that a lot of your web searches will wind up at an APUG thread, so spend a few bucks and join APUG to keep it on the air.

The Large Format Photography Forum is like APUG for people who have to haul their gear around in large, heavy cases.

SubClub.org is like the Large Format Photography Forum for people who may never shoot as much film surface area in their tiny cameras in their lives as some LF people do in one exposure.  They have more information than you thought existed on subminiature Minox, Minolta 16 and other pockets of submin enthusiasm.  They discuss all things related to tiny 8×11, 16mm, 110 and other less-than-35mm photography, like collecting the cameras, slitting film and enlarging those tiny negatives.

Head to Flickr to see the results people get with different film, developers, scanning and printing techniques.  There are groups for most every imaginable film photography discipline, and you can start a group yourself if you don’t find what you’re after.  The FPP has a group that gets great film images posted to it.  Looking for results people get with Eastman 5222 movie film or the European (?) Ploypan F (one of our fun film mysteries)?  Look them up on Flickr for scads of images.  What happens when you develop Green Latitude x-ray film in Obsidian Aqua?  Flickr.  Visit the I Shoot Film group, join and enter a film image in the monthly contest.

Looking for places to make purchase of your gear and supplies? Start here:

  • Freestyle Photo for a large selection of everything from film to paper to developers to tanks, trays and all the darkroom goodies you’ll need
  • The Film Photography Project Store (simply the FPP Store for those in the know) for film at or below the big retailers’ prices, esoteric film the majors can’t supply, tested used gear including instant cameras, Impossible Project film and the legendary FPP Plastic Fantastic Debonair 120 camera
  • B&H for film and developer, plus new enlargers if you want to go the new route.  They also carry Photographer’s Formulary product, but won’t ship some of it.
  • KEH Camera for a vast collection of very well described used gear at very reasonable prices.  They guarantee that it will work. They’re a real company in Georgia with a real telephone number and real people who have answered my questions about gear before I made purchase, multiple times at prices below what I saw on the auction site.
  • Photographer’s Formulary for an incredible range of modern and historic chemistry, newly crafted chemistry that improves on what even Kodak delivered, raw materials and replacements for discontinued formulae like Technidol and others.  Some of their products are also available at Freestyle and B&H, often with much better shipping rates.  Try their BW-65 paper developer.
  • Artcraft Chemicals for the raw materials to concoct your own developers, plus a new line of Inkpress enlarging paper
  • Digital Truth Photo for film, paper, chemistry, plastic cameras and the very handy Massive Development Chart with most film/developer combinations known to mankind
  • So you heard about some crazies developing film in Coffee???  Read and see all about it at the Caffenol site.  It smells pretty rough, but some folks are getting nice negs from it.  Be sure to follow all of the mixing directions, including letting it stand for a while to blend.
  • The Darkroom for film developing and enlargements in case you don’t want to give up your bathroom
  • Dwayne’s Photo for film developing, enlargements and a really terrific commemorative Kodachrome T-Shirt.  Don’t be the last one on your block to have it.
  • Film Rescue for salvaging that 1951 Panatomic-X you found in Granddad’s Hawkeye.  Ran across a roll of Kodachrome that might be those lost ’77 senior prom shots Mom took before you left the house with your date, did you?  Dwayne’s processed the very last roll of Kodachrome in 2010 (the process is gone forever – no hope of resuscitation), but Film Rescue says they have a good track record coaxing black and white images out of it. You’ll have to remember the powder blue of your tux, but you can at least see how stupid your hair looked.
  • DAG Camera to repair that Minox you bought because you can finally afford a used version of that cool spy camera you always wanted when you were a kid.  I’ve used Don – he’s the real deal.
  • Monoprice.com has absolutely nothing to do with film photography, but I enjoy buying cables, adapters and networking stuff from the so much that I had to list them here.  $50-60 for a 9′ Monster HDMI cable or $8 for a 10′ Cat6 cable at the big box stores?  I don’t think so, Tim.  Not when Monoprice has active, skinny, high-speed 6, 10 and 15′ HDMI cables for less than $18, and 10′ Cat6 patch cords for just over $2!  I noticed that the chain with the yellow price tag logo is now selling some of Monoprice’s cables, under the Monoprice name no less, but for a hefty markup.  Good on ’em for finally starting to represent their main competitor’s product.  Go straight to Monoprice for the best deals.  I’ve used their cables for years and, with the exception of their early failed attempts at $2 iPhone cables and their cheaper line of adapters, have been thrilled with their quality and customer service.
  • Check the Bay for all manner of used gear and old film.  You’ll not be able to find this collection in a year’s worth of estate sale travels, so be patient and you’ll find what you’re after.  Looking for your own roll of 1951 Pan-X?  Try the Bay.  Buy at your own risk; I’ve only been burned a few times but knew the risks going in.  I’ve found sellers pretty willing to make good on any badness that wasn’t disclosed in their listing.  Plus, you’ll find that you meet some great people just like yourself as you ask them questions about whatever it is they’re offering for sale.

You’ll unearth many more resources as you traipse around the web looking at these few I’ve listed.  There’s a growing library of great stuff out there; your only challenge will be deciding what you want to explore first.

August Jam, Charlotte Motor Speedway, 1974 (UPDATED August 2015)

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.

CamScan2238-3072-6

 

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…

august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert foghat band

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

august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert kodak tri-x film photography darkroom print yashica tl electro-x camera vivitar series 1 i zoom crowd

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.

august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert kodak tri-x film photography darkroom print yashica tl electro-x camera vivitar series 1 i zoom crowd

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…

 august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert kodak tri-x film photography darkroom print yashica tl electro-x camera vivitar series 1 i zoom crowd

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.

august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert kodak tri-x film photography darkroom print yashica tl electro-x camera vivitar series 1 i zoom crowd wolfman jack august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert kodak tri-x film photography darkroom print yashica tl electro-x camera vivitar series 1 i zoom crowd wolfman jack

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.”

august jam charlotte motor speedway 1974 rock concert kodak tri-x film photography darkroom print yashica tl electro-x camera vivitar series 1 i zoom crowd black oak arkansas jim dandy rebel flag dixie

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!

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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

Darkroom Update

Time flies.  Family life, work life, church life, and then all other stuff.  The darkroom finds itself in the other stuff category at the moment.  I did make two critical modifications to the developing rack, though – running water and storage.  It took the first two rolls to realize that my dad was a real pioneer developing without running water.  I fabricated, after a lot of trial and error, a manifold that feeds shower outlet water to a faucet above the top sliding developing tray, the film washer, print washer and a hand sprayer.  

This photo was taken with a tripod-mounted Nikon F2 and a 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor (exposure unrecorded) on Ploypan F shot at ASA 100.  It was developed in Adonal (Rodinal) 1+49 for 60 minutes, agitated for the first minute, then at 15, 30 and 45 minutes, then printed on Adorama multigrade glossy RC at maybe grade 2.  It’s very contrasty, but the shot wasn’t a good test because there aren’t many midtones in the stark white bathroom with a white PVC rack, black work surfaces and dark brown storage bottles.

bathroom darkroom wet side rack film chemistry print film washerEquipping a new darkroom with chemistry, paper and equipment can be as minimalist – or as extravagant – as you chose.  It’s also possible to get a little carried away, if you can imagine that.  Here’s what even a small collection of consumables looks like for someone like me who wants to get back into what they left years ago.

bathroom darkroom chemistry develop tray fixer stop bath film print

Not an extreme collection by any means; it just takes an assortment of things for a comfortable start-up.  The Tri-x is one of several 1982 vintage rolls that my mom bought for me just as silver started to skyrocket (Hunt brothers debacle) and we were afraid there wouldn’t be any more film that we could afford.  My sister found it and was kind enough to sent it to me.  It has pretty bad base fog and I’ve been meaning to get some HC-110 or L110 and try that because they a good reputation for minimizing fog.  I know now that Rodinal isn’t the developer for aged-out film.

Stay tuned for more.  Later.

 

A peak at the end of the book

I admire, now more than before, people with the discipline to write about what they do as they do it instead of catching up later.  That’s what has happened with Bathroom Darkroom, but it won’t get in the way of keeping up up to date on how things were put together.

The first film has been developed and the first prints made!  Here are a few views of the maturing darkroom and a scan of the first wet print.  Please don’t think it blasphemy that I illustrate a blog about film photography with both analog and digital images.  Digital is still very expedient; I had forgotten how much goes into getting a decent wet print.  The darkroom views, and the construction photos that will follow, were taken digitally way before facilities were available to develop and print.  I don’t have a film scanner so the B&W images you see will be scans of prints.  I hope that makes up a little for my non-purist position that there’s plenty or room for both media.

This is the Bathroom Darkroom at a glance.

darkroom_13894

Good thing the mirror is there or it would have taken two glances.  This is a real 4 1/2′ x 7 1/2′ bathroom, folks – not the darkroom you’d design on paper.  Dry side is a platform over the sink; wet side is on the rack in the shower stall in the background.  Upcoming topics include repairing the enlarger, building the wet rack, fabricating the vacuum easel, buying darkroom stuff online, yet another DIY print washer and my experience with safelights.  Oh – and some ramblings about different film and cameras with a hopefully memorable image or two.

Here is our first image, shot with a Nikon F2 on HP5, developed in XTOL 1:3, printed on Adorama Variable Grade RC somewhere in the neighborhood of grade 3 and developed in BW-65.

AllyFlyingKite2

The black speck in the sky is Ally’s kite.  The big spot half way up the kite string is from the negative, though I haven’t investigated it for root cause of a water spot or something more sinister.  The borders are from the blog software; I printed this not on the DIY borderless vacuum easel in the foreground, but by placing the 5×7 paper right on the enlarger baseboard, lined up with a framing square.  How’s that for low tech?  I’ll fire up the vacuum easel any day to see if it prints as well as it tested in the garage.  The print looks, on my calibrated display, as close to the paper 5×7 (cropped a little here) as I could get it.

I might be able to talk Ally into shooting and printing some, but she prefers being in front of the camera, while Addison enjoys the technical side of photography.  There might be something here for them both!

Tweaks are still going on, but now we’re going to spend more time shooting and printing than building.  This is exam week at school and then Addison will have time for a little film instruction.  I have some Polypan F shot in the F2 and Instamatics 100 and 500 ready to develop – maybe in Caffenol.

Stay tuned.

Lottery Win!

How often does one win the lottery without buying a ticket?  I did when our 15-year-old daughter asked me to teach her about film photography because she didn’t have time to take the class in high school.  She had seen students’ work posted around school and wanted to try her hand, but didn’t have enough schedule for the elective after cramming in everything else wanted – and had to – take.

Enter Dad, with an accordion file full of my old work and a chance to spread the joy of seeing one’s own creation come up at the bottom of a developer tray.  Dad isn’t completely old-school, though, so I decided that our journey into, and back into, the darkroom might be interesting to others who are sure to get the film photography bug.  Enjoy our trip that I’ll update you on as I make time in my own full schedule that now includes another project.

Checkers1-2A bit about my background before we start. I saw a witticism on blogging that said, “Never before has so much been written by so many for so few.”  Since you’re reading this, that means that at least one person at least started out reading what I wrote.  And like a lot of the one or more of you who read on, my photographic upbringing includes familiar phrases like: family Instamatic, Dad had a darkroom in the basement of his family’s home (but without running water), Dad’s Argus C3, hockey games, football games, the August Jam rock concert (more in some later post – with some photos), NASCAR races (insert the name of the events where you and your camera snuck closer than you were allowed), sold photos to brother’s peewee hockey team parents after developing and printing all night in my  bathroom darkroom, high school newspaper staff, high school yearbook staff, friend’s wedding, Popular Photography, the Amateuer Photographer’s Handbook, a Yashica MAT-124 that my Granddad gave me, a Yashica TL Electro-X that I bought myself, a Nikon F2 because it would make me a better photographer like the pros, joined the Navy, saw part of the world and photographed new places, had a family, reverted to point-and-shoot and VHS-C because those things needed the movies that are unwatched to this day, waded into digital, made enough shooting to support the habit, daughter hit high school, saw the work coming out of the film photography classes and asked Dad to teach it to her.

nascar pit stop charlotte motor speedway early 1970's tire changer windshield washer gas manAnd here we are.

Now comes the wonderful chore of turning our tiny basement bathroom into a 2-person wet darkroom classroom.  My wife thinks I’m a kid who’s found the toy I lost 35 years ago when I “aged out” of souping Pan-X, pushing Tri-X and printing in my parents’ second bathroom, donated on a regular basis to their son’s craft.  Donated for a number of reasons, love being one and their desire to keep me from pursuing other forms of teenage entertainment another.  Twenty years ago I’d have hit the yard and estate sale circuit and used gear departments of KEH, B&H, Pacific Image Camera and the like to cobble together a setup.  Today I hit the Bay to relieve people of choice goodies pulled from boxes full of junk taking up space in the corners of their garages.  It’s a mutual win and I don’t have to burn $3.79 gas (in 2013 dollars) driving all over the region.

richard petty king 43 nascar charlotte motor speedway world 600 dodge charger moparYou’ll remember, if you’re relatively well-seasoned, that we used to read books, scour the articles and ads in Pop and Mom Photo, write to manufactures asking for literature and bug salesmen in camera stores to find out what gear was available and what techniques worked best.  That’s been replaced in the 21st-and-a-half-century by trolling the Internet (contributing happens later).  Extra points if you recognize the previous reference to a very specific part of your childhood.

About those ads that took up so much of our time; remember Porter’s Camera Store?  I spoke last week with a wonderful lady there named Mickey, who said that they’re bowing out after 96 years.  This Internet thing that we thought might be a fad has been a mixed bag, indeed.  Thanks, Porter’s, for helping us cut our teeth on one of the best hobbies around.  Some of the icons I remember are still with us; KEH, which had those great used camera ads and Freestyle, where we could find all manner of fresh and outdated film to respool and a like range of paper on which to print.  Or Spiratone with $49.95 fisheyes and $60 400 6.3’s which, for an additional 10 bucks you could get multicoated. I don’t think I sprung for the coating, or that nifty shoulder stock…

An early thing I learned as I started poking around looking for enlarger recommendations is that what used to be photography is now analog photography; the phrase obviously coined to distinguish film craft from digital.  I also learned that photography the hard way is far from dead.  Sure, it has consolidated resulting in less variety in film emulsions and sizes, but I’ll work with what I can get my hands on without breaking the bank.  I’ll substitute tanks, trays and chemistry for the computer and Photoshop, and a grain focuser for Unsharp Mask . 

Contact StripThe months ahead are full of opportunities that include squeezing dry side, wet side and a place for the instructor to stand into a 4 1/2’ x 7 1/2’ half-bath and assembling the equipment without spending a mint.  Film’s resurgence, albeit a niche from what I can see, must have driven gear prices up a few notches from the dump-the-film days early in the digital craze of the last decade.  I don’t find the super bargains discussed in old forum posts, but bargains are still there if you’re patient and willing to do a little repair or cobbling-together.  Future construction articles will cover the wet rack, repairing the used enlarger, building the vacuum easel, safelight strategy and other parts of the facilities.  Photos will be digital until we get into production of the good kind that come from the bottom of a tray.

Stay tuned as I write about the journey to our first enlargement, our work to develop solid technique in 35mm with modern cameras and good glass, and then my planned excursions into my past as we dust off a TLR, an Instamatic or two, the venerable Brick, some cheapies from the Bay and maybe build a box camera and play with paper negatives.  Once the B&W processing and printing infrastructure is up and running, we can concentrate our spare time on the fun of creating images.

Enjoy.

Alan