a darkroom, a room where it is dark

who here still uses a darkroom? despite shooting with film for the past year or so I just started printing in a darkroom last month after scoring some supplies for cheap on craigslist. really amazing stuff. also kind of weird how this puts me in the same world of shared experience as people who are at least a generation older than me, and guarantees befuddlement from anyone my age who has never taken a photography class.

Friends gave me a really nice enlarger setup last week, but I don't envision setting up a darkroom any time soon. In hindsight, the time, money and effort put into getting a good print (and then properly washing/fixing it) for five prints per project was pretty terrible.

I used to, but havent in years. My uncle gifted me his old 60s or 70s B&W enlarger, neg tank, black bag and trays and stuff and I used to do both my own film and prints. Eventually I gave up on doing the film, as I could never get it quite right exposure-wise (poor temp control I think was the main problem). I used to just kneel in front of the bathtub and expose and process my prints with the exhaust fan on, towels stuffed under the door and a red light, haha. How I didnt fumigate myself to death I dont know.

Seems so weird now to think of 17 year old me doing that stuff. It was quite fiddly and took some practise but at one point I was pretty good at it. I'd be buggered if I knew how to do any of it now.

man, I miss darkrooms. If I owned my own home w/ enough space, I would def build one. If I made more money, I would look into paying for regular access to one.

Photographers who have come up strictly in the digital age have totally missed out on a fundamental part of the discipline imo. I feel the same way about typesetting/printmaking/etc. in terms of graphic design, actually. Having gone to art school in the late-90s/early-00s, my experience sort of spanned the gap b/w the two eras & it just seemed that those who had become familiar with the tactility of analog means developed a more exacting sense of their craft. Then again, I might just be a lol old-timer.

it is so weird that you just started this thread. was gonna spec harass you for info on setting up one. i mean i've used darkrooms before so i know the basics. but i just got a crazy deal on a brand new enlarger (99p!) and i want to start assembling all the other bits and pieces. the only thing is im way more interested in colour photography than b+w but i'm also a bit of a control freak and wrt creative ventures and i hate how much is taken out of your hands when you get them developed in a lab.

problem is that home color processing is on a WAY higher tier than b&w in terms of the equipment that you need (for both prints & film) & the maintenance, replacement chemicals etc.

i'd love to have access to a color lab at some point down the line, but I don't think I'd try to swing that @ home.

oh i wasnt saying i could ever swing that either! i meant that the fact that it would mean switching to black and white is one of the cons. constantly struggling to approach a coherent sentence.

yeah both of my enlargers (both! so weird to write that) have colour heads but from what I understand it's pretty crazy to get good prints, and nearly impossible to get archival ones from color printing

I mean I needed to buy an 80mm lens for enlarging 120, saw one in a kit on cl, went to pick it up and got a 4x5 enlarger along w/ it. the thing is massive, weighs like 60 pounds and is almost as tall as I am. no idea what to do with it

plax not sure if I can be of any help as I'm still pretty much bumbling through this also. pillbox, what sort of stuff did you do?

idk i think the best advice is always from fellow bumblers tbh

pillbox, what sort of stuff did you do? - Cliff Notes version: I was a photo (& illustration, eng lit) major as an undergrad. I learned on a 35mm manual SLR using b/w film & processing my own film + printing in darkrooms. A short distance down the line, I learned color printing & processing -- this was followed by a stint w/ my college newspaper shooting arts events (mostly concerts), during which I learned the ropes in terms of negative scanning & editing w/ Photoshop. Eventually I just combined all that stuff in various ways.
My first job after graduation was running a (trad color & digital via scanning) lab for an aerial photographer. After that I was doing less photo work & more g design (which is what I mainly do now), tho I did do quite a bit of portraiture & music promo stuff using a Mamiya 645 kit & an Imacon drum scanner (this combination yielded the best and most reliable results of everything I did, pretty much). Along the way, I experimented w/ alternative processes to some extent (pin-hole, polaroid transfers, van dyke brown printing, shooting w/ holgas etc.)

Nowadays I still mostly shoot w/ my 35mm set-ups, outsource the processing & edit digitally. I plan on buying a digital body for my SLR stuff, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Like I mentioned earlier, ultimately I'd like to have access to a darkroom or build one in my home. I really miss printing b/w, esp. using Kodak Technical Pan film, which you can't seem to get processed anywhere nowadays. I also have dreams of collecting vintage cameras and such & would just like to have any number of digital and trad tools to mess around with, but first I need to move up at least a few tax brackets!

I always seem to end up with the most expensive of hobbies and interests :/

hey so, did I kill this thread? I didn't mean to be all braggin 2011 & what not - it's just that i didn't really see any particularly concise answer to dayo's query & so erred on the side of longwindedness, which was perhaps out of the context of this thread.. In general, I would like to participate more on this board. And, dayo, I would ask the same question of you, but perhaps it has already been answered elsewhere before? I will say that you routinely have some of the most impressive WDYLL submissions!

carry on, then..

lol no pillbox! I mean, you didn't kill this thread - ILP is just one of the slowest boards on ILX. thanks very much for the background - much appreciated, no remonstrations necessary!! I'll write more about myself in a bit when I have time...

ha ha, I guess browsing via 'site new answers' fails to reveal how sparsely populated some of the boards are. I am curious to know about your background sometime.. If I'm not mistaken, you are shoot a fair amount of trad b/w, no?

man that's a totally rad history! so jealous that you grew up when film was still popular.

I 'learnt' mainly on digital but I remember shooting my dad's olympus SLR in high school, back when digital was still pretty expensive, this was before the Canon Rebel I think. I got digital cams in college after shooting for the newspaper - this was my 'pretty flowers and landscapes' phase. took a few years off from serious shooting, then bought an olympus DSLR and then the E-P1. never really warmed to either. got interested in 'street' photography via looking at photobooks.

approximately one year ago I bought a leica which has pretty much changed my whole life and approach. cliche, I know. but after getting one and starting to shoot B&W film with it has really uh changed the way I look at photography. realizing that digital has shown just how much of the film era is artifice - and by extension that artifice reflects onto digital itself now. started developing my own film too, so easy. got bored with shooting all these pictures and not doing anything with them besides scanning them and posting them on the web, so have moved into the darkroom side this summer - unfortunately won't have a lot of time in the upcoming months, but I'll plug at it.

also went to my relatives house about 6 months ago and took away a bunch of really old family negatives from the 40s, 50s, and 60s - saw some big negatives, wondered what they were, found out it was MF film. bought a TLR and jesus christ the quality is insane. really jealous of your previous mamiya setup w/ imacon scanner!

don't know where I'm gonna go from here but I'm pretty satisfied with photography atm and beyond lusting after new gear there's not really much to do except go out and take more pictures!

hey dayo can i ask, is there anything specific about the leica that felt like such a step up, or is it just a general thing? i shoot w/an om-1 & think that it has a nice kinda natural look, & the camera's super neat & well designed. & i always figured that getting a leica would be that, but moreso - really good sorta honest rendering. i occasionally check the blog of a photographer who like got a leica and whose enthusiasm i think suddenly spiked, & beyond appreciating a lot of stuff the old guys' took with them i've never totally understood whether it was a specific thing or just a general sense of awe at the results.

nice hearing such enthusiastic testimonial at photographing in general anyhow

re: developing; i have really never done that, pretty much, beyond a couple of long ago sessions in which i got to understand how it works. & i really should, i kind of feel like it's another half of the process that i miss out on. i have such issues with some black and white films coming out not how i want them, too.

my dad's camera is an OM-G which is I think an OM-10, a consumer version of one of the OM's? great camera!

haha I know I'm gonna sound like one of those insufferable leicaphiles but yeah there are a lot of differences between rangefinders and SLRs - I'll try to break them down on those terms, not leica vs. the world. then I'll say a little about what separates leica rangefinders from others

-the viewfinder: rangefinder viewfinders are one-size-fits all, you get framelines that tell you what will roughly be in the picture. people love to go on about how important framelines are, how you can see what goes on outside the 'picture' and let's you anticipate and yadda yadda. the other key thing is that it approximates your eye - everything will be in focus, it's kind of like making a square with your hands, holding it up to your eye and thinking 'I want a picture of this.' with an SLR, you see things in focus or out of focus, and you also see what exactly the lens is seeing. with a rangefinder you never really know what the picture will look like until after development. lenses of the same focal length will look different and you will never really know til after the fact.

-focusing can be a bit more of a pain as things don't 'snap into focus' in the viewfinder and you may have to focus and recompose. for low light focusing, rangefinders are pretty great.

the viewfinder is how you view the world and those fundamental differences do find themselves back into how people use them to take pictures, imo.

as for the leica cult:
-leicas are really simple - you just adjust the aperture on the lens and the shutter speed. I've been using a handheld meter and after you 'learn the light' you really just start changing settings on them automatically and it kind of becomes second nature.
-they're built tough and GERMAN, obviously. I'm a tactile guy and winding film on a leica feels kind of like winding a mechanical watch up or something - you can feel the gears rotating. there's a solidness and heft to it that I haven't come across in my OM or any other rangefinder I've used.

that's about it, really - I think the main thing is that the leica seems to 'get out of the way' once you're used to it, in a way that other cameras I've used don't. which is better obv as that lets you concentrate more on the picture taking.

as for developing, yeah, it's totally worthwhile to do it on your own, and people are unloading their old developing shit on craigslist for cheap. but it is a time investment, takes about half an hour to develop, and there's all sorts of variables etc - but the results can be worth it!

sorry, that was really long! I guess in a few sentences, the way a RF viewfinder sees is similar to how your eye sees - everything pretty much in focus. a SLR viewfinder on the other hand, is how your lens sees, which is pretty different from what your eye sees!

aw man that's so useful - i was ready to butt in after a sec to say, you know i actually own a rangefinder, because i bought a yashica last year that i haven't used so much (i think i need a new battery, idk, the first roll i took was a washout). but tbh i was still kinda in the dark about what the deal was w/them, so thanks.

think om-10s are p much om-1s but w/autofocus, btw. it's funny you saying that you're tactile & that leicas work w/that, because part of what i get out of carrying my om-1 around all the time is that same familiarity; the mechanical click of winding on the roll, the hammer of taking a photo* (there is that don delillo thing about the harmony & rhythm between writing and the punctuation of typewriter-sounds, and i think i feel like that about my camera - that anticipating the click actually improves my timing, sorta). & they're, to me, such a neat object that i don't have to really look at it anymore - i have as good an understanding of the light as i need & can fuck with it without getting too caught up. i think i still think of seeing-what-the-lens sees as a plus (iirc the om-1 was a big deal because of its positioned mirror that allowed you to do that), but maybe playing with my yashica'll change that.

know i'm de-railing here. i think about developing sometime - i think it would be a rent-a-studio-room thing, at first at least - and then don't get around to it. but b/w printing here is expensive, so i ought to.

*don't know if i'm veering into 'the smell of old books' territory here but really, it's something that feels integral to what the camera even is

haha yeah no I totally get you. I owned a canonet way back before I owned a leica and I didn't really 'get' rangefinders then. what hurts is that most of the old fixed lens rangefinders have really really dim viewfinders due to old age, and getting them cleaned usually costs more than what the camera is worth. I did take a look through a recently cleaned one though (minolta 7s) and it was really amazing - as bright a viewfinder as I've ever seen. leica rangefinders are kind of special because the focusing at the center is sharply delineated from the rest of the VF - it's a little rectangular box that you can clearly see, as opposed to the fuzzy circle-ish areas on every other rangefinder I've used. not sure if bessas or contaxes are different.

yeah the tactile part of the camera is a big deal - another thing I love about leicas is the softness of the shutter sound, it's a quiet little click and nothing more.

also developing film at home is super easy and you don't need a darkroom, just a changing bag. and if you don't want to print, get an epson v500 (great budget film scanner for about $120 new). takes me about half an hour to scan a roll.

oh wow. yeah, the viewfinder on the yashica is p bad, relative to the kinda 'logic' of the om-1, at least* (imo &c); you need the object on which you're focusing to be semi-illuminated and i feel slightly like i'm seeing double. i managed to clean the viewfinder screen of my om-1 (which was my mom's, from back in the day) a couple of months ago, after removing a series of incrementally-more-terrifying small delicate sheets and objects inside, which has really paid off.

which leica did you get, out of curiosity?

about developing; i hadn't really thought of what removing the printing part of the process entailed. but, if you're only using the changing bag to remove the film, does that mean that all the things i associate with the developing process - deciding on the contrast or darkness or w/e - you do digitally? the film scanner recommendation sounds tempting but i don't know if i'm quite ready for too much playing around with the end result.

*i have a lot of photos of myself frantically waving my hands and squinting, amid explaining to people how to use the camera - there is this little centre-circle in the middle, and when something's out of focus, like a straw in a glass of water &c

also does developing with a changing bag mean standing with your head in a bag for a long period of time? because that is the only way i can change sheets & i generally find that a humiliating experience

my first leica was a m4-2, commonly regarded as a good entry level leica since it has a lot of the modern accoutrements (primarily the rapid load film system) but still pretty affordable since it was made in CANADA (the horrors!). I sold it last year after 'upgrading' to a M4 which is a little smoother in feel but not really different at all. I've owned an M3 and M2 though and really there's not much differences between the M2 and M4 and later on, the M3 is the odd duck out being the first leica M ever and having a higher-mag viewfinder that can only fit a 50mm lens framelines (other leicas go down to at least 35, some 28mm).

you've totally got the wrong idea about changing bags - you need to do a handstand whilst using them, and that is only during days when the humidity is below 60%...

nah changing bags are totally easy, just for transferring the film from the canister to the tank, which is light tight. everything else happens in daylight. yeah I do have visions in my head of grizzled photo vets pulling out film halfway done in the darkroom, looking at them and saying "this needs 2 more minutes in the soup" and putting them back in. but I don't think you need to do that. I've just followed manufacturer's recommendation and have gotten pretty good results.

ah okay - sorry i am being a total novice here - i think i was thinking that the point at which you determined those things was while enlarging, rather than rescuing the negatives. 'manufacturer's recommendation' = the fineprint on the inside of the film case that tells you that 400 speed needs seven minutes or w/e, right?

i had one of those 'oh i see the m4-w kinda is affordable!/oh no wait that's an old users manual with a picture on the front' ebay moments. i see something old online that says that they were going for around $500US, but that maybe seems sorta outdated now. it's good to know though. one day maybe.

to come full circle, i looked up at the original post to remember whose thread i was derailing and was pleased to see it was yours - so how has it been different enlarging rather than playing with the scanned negatives? maybe that's too open a question.

yeah I picked up two books by david vestal, and from what I gather you can pretty much rescue any shitty negative with some creative enlarging! actually it's a really good book - the internet is great and all but damn having so much authoritative knowledge in one place is very cool, learning a lot of things that I've never thought about before as well. for example, shadow details develop relatively early on in the developing process but don't extent the farther you carry the process out - extended developing times really only develop the highlights more, so there's no point really.

$500 is on the bottom end of any film leica, if you can get one for that price in good working condition, congrats! one nice thing is that they keep their value really well - you can pretty much sell them for the same price you bought them minus shipping or whatever, which is how I've managed to try a lot of leicas out! also the lenses have been increasing in value - leica lenses have gone up by 50-200% depending on the model in the past year. :/

enlarging is definitely changing the way I think about taking pix. really makes you think about 'how a photograph should look since there are so many diff ways of printing from a negative, using diff contrast filters etc. I'm afraid I'm gonna turn into one of those old photo dudes who has STRONG OPINIONS about pictures, i.e. "that pic sucks, look at the highlights, so washed out!" etc. etc. :/

but it's really fun and instructive anyway

the other thing is though I think a strong picture punches through whatever technical inadequacies it has. thank you robert frank for proving this to be so.

one day I will collect vintage leicas

$500 is on the bottom end of any film leica, if you can get one for that price in good working condition, congrats!

what i am saying is, i will take your m-4 for a cool one hundred dollars. it's interesting about the price jump; photography is such a thing now (i don't say that as an OG who took photos before digital was invented, just that it's so much an identity and a pursuit now i think) that i guess it makes sense that old crap is getting more expensive.

when you start a thread on highlights and lowlights in a year, i will drag it right back down to the basics having just started developing.

I'm afraid I'm gonna turn into one of those old photo dudes who has STRONG OPINIONS about pictures, i.e. "that pic sucks, look at the highlights, so washed out!" etc ///////// the other thing is though I think a strong picture punches through whatever technical inadequacies it has. thank you robert frank for proving this to be so.

i think i remember arguing with you about the virtues of cassettes in another thread, way back, & touching on the kinda experiential rather than statistical way we consume things - so the right cassette at the right time beating a cd on a good soundsystem at another time or w/e, celluloid film beating digital rendering in its poverty & its inaccuracy, all superior just because we consume stuff when we happen to consume it and are affected by it in a million ways, rather than on the sole merit of its fidelity or presentation. and i totally go the same way with photographs, more and more; part, i think, in reaction to going on flickr occasionally and just being overwhelmed by the high standard and competence and abundance of good photography & composition, to the extent that the more pressing goal with photos seems to be capturing moments and that-things-happened and recording people, rather than attaining technical proficiency and precision and aesthetic appeal; and part because i can't compare the picture i managed to take with the picture i didn't take but somehow might have. it's like agnes varda's recent films, the ones she will make out of footage she shot pretty much on the move, sometimes with the camera pulled from her bag, shooting all day long not worrying about duration limits; i wish they were shot on film, they'd look so much richer!, be more evocative!, but they only exist the way they exist because of the medium, and swapping that out while maintaining the film is fiction. it would be nice if i was better prepared and a better composer & knew how to push what i saw for its best representation, but i still feel like all of that's secondary, and that it's worth shooting on 100 in a dark room knowing it'll barely show just to have the pictures you get. this is too dark, & is not photography done right, but it doesn't exist in any other way than the way i took it, and i think i end up with some sense of parental pride in it existing at all, the bit where i bothered to take it rather than the bit where i didn't do it right.

i don't know exactly what i'm arguing against, here, because: just be well prepared, know how to shoot and take all the photos you want obviously makes sense. but i would hate to get too far into looking at the craft involved when i feel like it's only the second-most-important thing going on, that a shitty photo is still worth a damn, more and more the longer it sits unlooked at. again to invoke flickr, there is a thing with seeing numerously-favourited pictures-of-girls on there, not so much the ones with lots of creeps being all 'woah hot t- i mean light', but the ones where the photo might be nice but it is a person caught looking beautiful that is giving you the feeling it gives you. it is so neat to have captured people for a second. robert frank otm:

http://www.theslideprojector.com/images/photo1/chapter15-theatomicage/theamericans/cityhallrenonevada.jpg

http://p2.la-img.com/404/21246/7270397_1_l.jpg

i did a little photography in school but shooting was either in controlled tutorials where i didn't really get to make any mistakes and absorbed fuck all. I got taught developing by my friend brigie tho who was kindof just figuring it out a little too (tho still a lot more advanced than me). I used photography as a tool in college but stuck to the automatic settings as there was only one film camera and it was in demand and could only be rented on a nightly basis meaning time tended to be of the essence. shortly afterwards i found my praktica in a bag i bought in a market and as it is fully manual meant that i kindof had to teach myself some basics. its been a rocky road but i'm starting to feel like i know what i'm doing like a tiny bit now. I kindof love this camera and tbh i couldn't be bothered using another one. i know this prolly sounds silly and short sighted but i just kindof feel like you can go deep with something. like i'd rather listen to somebody playing an instrument they've played all their life and know intimately than some guy messing around a bit with gadgets. i'm def at the bottom rung of amateur but i really love taking photographs and i love when they come out good.

i really love taking photographs and i love when they come out good.

totally
i think i've probably had times when three consecutive rolls i've got back have just been really bland and not good and i have the thought of, i should not do this b/c i am not good at it, but it's really satisfying to get good ones back. maybe developing would give me some room to make that happen more often

i mean i know from experience that you can totall rescue a photo at the developing stage.

I saw a praktika at the used camera shop I went to yesterday and thought of you plax! they are big and hefty and satisfying to hold.

aw i love that!

haha schlump if I ever meet you IRL you are welcome to borrow some of my cameras for a while!

totally intersting points you raise about the consumption of photographs, this is a question that really does need addressing in the digital & flickr age, but fwiw it's an old chestnut. here's an excerpt from the david vestal book which was published in 75:

Progress toward Mediocrity. As the technology advances, the craft recedes. Manufacturers and processing services take over more and more of the work and the picture decisions, while photographers get lazier and less competent. While technology holds out to us more possibilities than photographers have ever known, we use them less and less resourcefully. We have, on the whole, no idea how much we could achieve and it doesn't occur to us to find out by trying. Too often we are content with sloppy, mediocre work. The one thing we've gained is spontaneity - useless without perception.

the last sentence really rings true to me and I could probably spend a good 1000 or 2000 words talking about picture making and consumption in the digital age. you're otm about film and yeah it's about the method of consumption as well as the technical aspects - lots of people say that the best art is produced through constraints and yeah maybe digital is too easy or has the wrong kinds of limits or has limits that we haven't really begun pushing up against, but the limits of film are really satisfying and fit my method (at least for now) or maybe I changed my method to fit the vessel?

and yeah it's a cliche but photography and your comments about pursuit of an identity are uncomfortably otm but at the end of it all photography (for me) is def a filter through which to interact w/ the world and w/ people and that's why I find it important, even if nobody else ever sees the pictures I make.

is that contact sheet from frank? I bought the expanded edition of the americans looking in because it includes a bunch of his contact sheets! I haven't looked at it yet though. I caught the americans show at SFMoma a year or two ago and it was staggering. the whole project is staggering. I looked at some of the ones he cut and goddamn if you couldn't have made the careers of ten photographers on the strength of his tramped on cutting room leftovers.

yeah both of my enlargers (both! so weird to write that) have colour heads but from what I understand it's pretty crazy to get good prints, and nearly impossible to get archival ones from color printing

My college had a C-print processor, which made printing color super easy. There's a lot less dialing in of contrast or time, given the latitude of C-41 negatives - then you just put your paper in the line processor and out it comes on the other end. Home processing of color, without the automated processor, is much more difficult.

In terms of archivability, dye transfer prints (extremely difficult to produce) were about it - Cibachrome/Ilfochrome (prints made from slides) were close. C-prints (standard color prints) are not archival at all - digital inkjet is a definite step up in this arena.

I remember loading up all the chemicals for the colour 1-hour machine I used to run at a chemists I worked at. Man, the smell. It got into everything I wore.

i spent a while trying to find this specific photo i found a while ago of an old baptism, from like 18--, this beautiful scene of a hundred people gathered around the lake where a guy is getting dunked, to illustrate the whole more-with-less thing.

think it's otm about the constraints of film seeming just about right - i think thirty six photos (i mean i don't wanna brag but i think i can get 39), knowing that after i'm going to shoot with another sort of film, is about right. a downside of digital is going to shows & seeing people taking photos of like the empty stage before anyone comes on, just like meritless documentary that's you think is going to slightly dilute the review process. or being able to very neatly match what they're seeing with some kind of filter or idea of what it is - so you go on a walk and you see an old gate and you shoot it in sepia and it matches the idea of what a photo of a gate should look like.

i don't think the photography-as-identity thing is really a knock, only a thing; i maybe roll my eyes when i see like a couple walking along both strangled by enormous telephoto-wielding cameras, but the whole thing probably says something more interesting than 'this is fashionable', in the same way that i think the affection for holgas is significant of like, enjoyment of non-digital, imperfect, blurry rendering of your life. i think there are a lot of interesting dynamics to being the-person-with-the-camera, that it has baggage or whatever, but totally agree that it feels like a significant way of just how you see things. i feel annoyed if i leave the house without it.

the contact sheet is frank, from his bus photos, one in particular which i was trying to find but couldn't (of an old couple waiting to cross the street, i used to have a photocopy of it on my door). and yeah totally otm about his contact sheets. iirc he took 27000 photos for the americans, which is obviously reassuring both in terms of not needing a killer ratio & sweet in terms of what that must have meant, & it's true, looking through the ones that are in that book especially, that you could sub out a bunch of the others to equal effect. but even so they're just such pleasing documentary. i looked through a photo album of my mom's a while ago & some of the photos - like good or bad didn't even enter into it, they were just so valuable for being a record of, a., thirty years ago, and b., her life thirty years ago. it's great if you are eggleston & have an idea for shit that is going to be anachronistic time capsule fodder in 30 years, but even if you're not you inherit so much just collaterally by picking up a camera, the same way a film does, the way blow up did - you are getting something forever. have you seen frank's cocksucker blues, btw dayo? i v much recommend, he's kinda using the film camera the way he uses his stills camera for long sections of it. lot of the detail in the first few minutes of this - repent now - is great.

so, im going back to school at the end of september and i decided to check out the film facilities there and holy shit

Traditional Equipment Facilities and Processes

Black & White Darkroom

Deep tank Black & White film processing room for all formats up to 8x10"
5 Dunco Multigrade head enlargers for formats up to 6x7cm
1 De Vere 504 Condenser/Cold Cathode head enlager for all formats up to 5x4"
1 De Vere 5108 Multigrade diffuser head enlarger for all formats up to 8x10"
1 Bookable special process darkroom containing 1 De Vere 508H horizontal, floor mounted Multigrade diffuser head enlarger for all formats up to 8x10" for producing mural prints up to 6'x4'
Two bath archival print wash system
1 Fibre based print glazer

Colour Darkroom

5 De Vere Enlargers for all formats up tp 8x10"
RA4 Colour print processor for up to 20x24"

I hope this means i can actually use all this stuff.

holy shit that there is a colour dark room is what i mean

wow that sounds awesome plax! mural prints!

I get 38 from Ilford, 39 from fuji xp

yeah I'm not sure how we're going to maintain or preserve the value of a photograph as document, as historical signifier in 20 years when we will have an exponentially larger pool of photos to draw on than from any other point in time in history. but maybe we're going to be like all those who lament the death of poetry, who have been lamenting the death of poetry, of literature - the same swan song's been sun for nearly a century, but the craft endures. I'll admit that it took me a while to 'get' great photography but it's good to know that as long as there are people who are getting their cameras for the first time and who are interested in turning to the past for guidance, that at least some of them will find the good light.

my friend asked me yesterday if my default role in life was 'spectator' and I, to my surprise, said yes! and yes, that is how I go through life these days.

haven't seen cocksucker blues, or pull my daisy, or any of frank's video work, despite him probably being my favorite photographer of all time! only know his stills. I'll track those down one of these days, when I have time..

p.s. a darkroom is really time confusing!

wait I meant to write time consuming. both I guess

another reason to use a leica

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Freedom_Train

I get 38 from Ilford, 39 from fuji xp

ha, i hadn't actually done the maths, but that sounds about right. on film, btw, i realise i am ten thousand years behind the world, here, but i just shot a roll of tri-x 400; it's so great! like i don't think i'll buy other b/w film again unless i'm getting a 1600/3200 roll. all this after hearing it described prefixed with 'classic film stock' or something, i don't know why it had passed me by for all these years. re: film efficiency, btw, i liked the guy you linked to here or maybe in the other thread who was cataloguing his first-of-the-roll shots.

the same swan song's been sun for nearly a century, but the craft endures. I'll admit that it took me a while to 'get' great photography but it's good to know that as long as there are people who are getting their cameras for the first time and who are interested in turning to the past for guidance, that at least some of them will find the good light.

yeah, this is on the money. like i could get into my teenage wonderings about whether people will still listen to the velvet underground in the year 3000, here, & will it still be cool, but even though it's kinda hard to imagine the quantities of like a hundred years more of art (with the added benefits(/'benefits'?) of the potential catch-all efficiency of modern, digital archiving!), but having access to this stuff is compelling on its own merit and as historical document. there are enough guys who sit and don't listen to a note recorded after 1930 who don't necessarily have an explicit link to that period. i like thinking about the photo both as an invention - like there was a time we didn't have them & you had to just be real good at drawing or remembering - and as a pretty integral solution to some human concerns, like they are a pretty good fit with our need to document and remember and capture and to stop time etc. so until holograms or slightly superior gifs they are probably here to stay.

anyway: this revive was kinda belated, having missed the last few posts - i can't even imagine colour developing, really, & it makes me think of that eggleston story about being freaked out by the red coming out in the tray as he printed his lightbulb shot - but while dithering over whether or not to swamp this thread with more dilettantish queries & faux-naive wonder at how cameras work i decided that i would just keep trucking, because at my end at least it is nice to be learning & maybe for the moment it gives answer-ers a sense of venerable elder status. so i'm going to keep asking until dayo just wearily loses all joy he once extracted from photography as a pursuit. i go in circles over what significant thing i've just found out about will further my photographic pursuits (oh tri-x!, or a double lens medium format camera!, or a leica!, that's what i've been doing wrong, &c), but i've never really been good on lenses, & am usually slightly mystified when i read about them (usually it's some sprawling messageboard discussion from lens-hoarders who toast some aspect of a lens' design & corroborate this with a photo of just like a chair, usually a chair, of imperceptible purpose, just a chair with another ten posts of fallout regarding the crispness of field). & accepting how fond i am of my om-1, i was looking up to see whether there was consensus about superior lenses, whether they were much preferable to the 50mm zuiko it comes with. & there is; after an expensive macro lens, people are really into another 50/1.8 lens that apparently is neatly made, a real step up, etc. so i start looking around & think i could probably get one pretty easily, but i just wonder: will that be a notable step up? b/c my instinct would obviously be to get something that's a marked contrast from what i already have, but i don't know whether the simple quality jump is something i'll even be hip to. this was sort of a 'question' & is maybe similar to my query about why-do-you-love-a-leica, but i think i just don't have a handle on a) what's going to change between two lenses of similar spec but varying quality, and b) the link between superior lens + superior photos. is it just rendering, or it is it also like, giving you more leeway to shoot or processing light better or, w/e.

http://omexperience.wordpress.com/comparisons-thoughts-misc/zuiko-50mm-shoot-out/

like this is super useful & interesting but also on some level just does not compute and feels like evidence of actual early twenty first century insanity, to me

realizing that digital has shown just how much of the film era is artifice - and by extension that artifice reflects onto digital itself now.

stet - I'm just coming around from a pretty big illness so I don't have time to put together a lengthy post at the moment with my thoughts on the subject. but I'll get back to you within a week, hopefully! (some other big changes happening in my life that will grab all my attention the next few days)

schlump - toss out everything you've ever been reading about other 50s being better because that's rubbish and never ever ever question your lens again. that way lies foolishness.

what I might suggest instead is to think about a different focal length. OM 35mm/2.8's can be picked up for under a 100, under 50 maybe! a different focal length = a different way of seeing, and that will be vastly more valuable than worrying about whether your 50mm is better than the next guy's 50mm!

have more to say on this too but see the caveat in my response to stet!

stet - I'm just coming around from a pretty big illness so I don't have time to put together a lengthy post at the moment with my thoughts on the subject. but I'll get back to you within a week, hopefully! (some other big changes happening in my life that will grab all my attention the next few days)

have been comparing + contrasting dayo's mentions of illness elsewhere with my previous 'hm so can you put together a succinct market rundown on all the camera lenses commercially available now and in the past?' request + feeling bad; hope you're doing better! & hope you ride out the next few days of the constant earthquakes to which you referred.

advice much appreciated anyhow & yeah, my unschooled instinct is to question the lens-enthusiasts and embrace something different. MY FIFTY'S JUST AS GOOD AS YOURS, NEXT GUY.

wake the thread when you're feeling good, i'll go easy on the photo 101.

haha no prob. in the meantime read this

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-02-09-22.shtml

which seems to be describing exactly what you are going through atm

you probably already know the author right, mike johnston of TOP? he's the guy from who I've gotten most if not all my info about how lenses work

you probably already know the author right, mike johnston of TOP?

managing to simultaneously flatter + shame me here. will read!, thanks i appreciate it yo. feeling a maternal instinct to tell you to get some rest in the face of all of this q&a over-exertion, dayo.

ps check yr webmail

hah well I think several of us on here read him so I just assumed!

didn't get anything at my webmail?

shit yeh get well soon, dude. sorry to hear that.

oh no?, mm it said it sent okay (via ilx, right). maybe give it a while & if nothing turns up i'll hit you up some other way. it wasn't like ... an urgent diagnosis or anything?, just shooting the shit.

haha okay - my e-mail is yao dawt daniel at g, the mail company, you know

thanks for the well wishes stet! 'pretty big illness' is probably stretching it compared to what a lot of people have gone through on this board + they don't whinge about it! I'm on the recovery tho

When you factor in the vagaries of printing (chemical or digital, with all the post-processing involved in either), I generally believe that the difference in various similar lenses is almost impossible to discern one lens from another. With modern lenses, the only problem I run into seems to be autofocus - lenses with a tendency to front or back focus to a degree that's almost unnoticeable in the viewfinder but shows up on a 10x15" print.

The important difference in lenses/bodies/etc., to me, is how they let you work. A rangefinder feels different in the hand, carries in a different way, from a digital SLR with a 3 pound zoom hanging off the front.

I process film in buckets in my garage (16mm negative)

But also I will soon be teaching at a school with darkroom, looking forward to that

Also I just got one of those, what now
http://www.mattdentonphoto.com/images/yashicamat_124.jpg

i think you do your wash on like 30 degrees in the top barrel & then just move the load down and set it to spin dry oh wait what?

admrl I had a 124-G as my first TLR, it's a sweet camera!

schlump - so the deal with lenses is that, by what metrics do you measure them? what are the standards that you rate all lenses against? how do you choose those standards, for what reason?

the pretty standard response to that is 'lens sharpness.'

which is kind of bullshit because there are so many factors that go into how we perceive the sharpness of the rendering of a lens - see wikipedia definitions of 'acutance.' you can bump a lenses sharpness in post if you're shooting digital. a sharp lens is also not always preferable - there are lots of telephoto lenses that are 'razor sharp' but also render people in a very unflattering way, since they are so 'clinical.'

people obsess about sharpness - is the lens sharp wide open, is it sharp in the corners wide open (ask yourself: how many times can you remember actively disliking an otherwise great photo just because some detail in the corner was rendered unsharp)? all lenses become pretty sharp stopped down 2-3 stops (around 4, 5.6, 8) for most lenses and become indistinguishable from one another.

I think the following characteristics are more useful for evaluating lenses: resolution, contrast, tonality. resolution - a measure of how much detail the lens can resolve, usually measured in lines per mm - you can use test charts to do so. this is not necessarily related to lens sharpness.

lens contrast - how big a dynamic range the lens renders. modern lenses, for the most part, are high-contrast because that is naturally pleasing to the eye. lenses from before the 70s tend to be much lower contrast, which is great for black and white and for color images too if you like that pale, washed out pastel look.

tonality - how the lens renders transitions in gradations of color. this is related to lens contrast, I think, and is also very subjective. it's also controlled much more by the developing method as well.

the problem with the last two characteristics is that they're really subjective and hard to measure! much harder than lens sharpness, anyhow. lens sharpness rarely contributes that much to a good picture though, I think? unless you're shooting landscapes. I personally care much more about the contrast/tonality of a picture nowadays than the lens sharpness. in fact one of the lenses in my kit is a 50mm 'sonnar' design which is used primarily because it renders things pretty softly wide open! lovely effect.

in short, you won't see any differences at all between the 50mm you have right now and any other 50mm unless you're using some metric like 'sharpness', and even then does a sharper picture make for a better picture? think of your favorite photos, think of favorite photos taken by other photographers - would any of these photos have been improved by better sharpness? half the time, what we mean when we say "this picture shoulder have been sharper' is that 'this picture should have been focused better'!

When you factor in the vagaries of printing (chemical or digital, with all the post-processing involved in either), I generally believe that the difference in various similar lenses is almost impossible to discern one lens from another. With modern lenses, the only problem I run into seems to be autofocus - lenses with a tendency to front or back focus to a degree that's almost unnoticeable in the viewfinder but shows up on a 10x15" print.

The important difference in lenses/bodies/etc., to me, is how they let you work. A rangefinder feels different in the hand, carries in a different way, from a digital SLR with a 3 pound zoom hanging off the front.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, August 24, 2011 12:15 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

I agree with a lot of this, but I think broadly speaking you can still 'see' differences between lenses - like I shot with a modern 35mm biogon for a while and I can easily pick out the shots with that one versus the ones I took with an old canon RF 35mm from the 60s. if you stick with one film/developer combination and switch lenses, you should get sensitized to the differences over time.

I definitely agree with you in choosing lenses based on how they feel in the hand - lens ergonomics tend to be underrated.

realizing that digital has shown just how much of the film era is artifice - and by extension that artifice reflects onto digital itself now.

Dayo what did you mean by this?
― stet, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 3:58 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

well stet I guess it's as much a part of my own innate assumptions than anything else - until I started to take photography 'seriously' I just took it for granted that pictures were a true depiction of things that were seen in real life, you know, because it's formed from physical light that has struck a physical objected and been recorded by the camera. I never really thought about the 'decisions' that had to be made in order for that recording to be displayed back to us.

but now I think of pictures as, to borrow from winogrand, how the light struck an object and was focused by the lens of a camera onto a piece of recording material, whether that be film or a digital sensor. the camera is not a replacement for the eye and will not be for quite some time - I think that the perfect camera would probably be a device that plugs into your brain and records the signals your eyes send to your brain, because that would actually be a recording of what your eyes see! but for now we have cameras.

so now when I look at a photo I tend to think about what decisions were made to represent that photo - the contrast of the image, the brightness/darkness of an image, the lens used (is it a distorting wide-angle? a compressing telephoto?) the color palette. when you compare a digital photo to a film photo, you realize that film really did distort the picture in terms of the way it rendered color. and there are differences too between what film does and what digital does that's just not in the film grain - it's also in how transitions between out of focus and in focus areas are rendered (I find film to be much more pleasing in this respect), in how long tonalities are rendered (here we see the common complaint that digital is too 'plasticky'). the 's-curve' is also much more evident in film than with the flat, linear response of a digital sensor.

at the end of the day, even a straight processed RAW file is going to look pretty different than the actual scene that was captured. I guess that's what I mean by the 'artifice' of photography. probably pretty obvious to all of you guys!

such a great run of posts, dayo: thanks for the breakdown. feeling slightly empowered at being able to confidently rebuff the idea of investing in the non-specific improved functioning of a superior 50mm.

tonality - how the lens renders transitions in gradations of color. this is related to lens contrast, I think, and is also very subjective. it's also controlled much more by the developing method as well.

one of the articles you linked upthread (the one i hadn't heard of the author of) was really good at pointing out shots that were 'sharp', maybe to the detriment of the images, & then also touching on images that had the leica 'look' on account of, (i think), gradation of colour and then also that interplay between the content in & out of focus. & that's probably something i'm more interested in, which film & light seem to be bigger determinants of in my experimentation with cameras. there is a local guy, here, who takes photos a lot & teaches & stuff, & is technically on another level, and occasionally sets up his MF camera in town to shoot people, posting the results online. and they're really good, strong photos, but how stern the handling of light is - eg, in rendering faces with enough pronounced variations in tone so as to make everyone look variegated + blotchy, & so texturally diverse to appear made of stone - really detracts from their effect as the portraits-of-people they're intended as, i think, making something else that is perhaps as interesting, but really diverging from capturing the people involved, because of that discrepancy.

half the time, what we mean when we say "this picture shoulder have been sharper' is that 'this picture should have been focused better'!

please do not take away my ability to blame my tools / otm

so now when I look at a photo I tend to think about what decisions were made to represent that photo - the contrast of the image, the brightness/darkness of an image, the lens used (is it a distorting wide-angle? a compressing telephoto?) the color palette. when you compare a digital photo to a film photo, you realize that film really did distort the picture in terms of the way it rendered color.)

i think what's funny about this, though, is that there's a loop made by, first, understanding & resigning yourself to the artifice of it all, and, then, coming back to seeing it as a kind of truth in accepting that while all of those things were indeed variables & manipulated, it was to the end of capturing & encapsulating 'something', the threads of which float disparately amid a real life scene but that you might get a chance to tie up to give an impression of a sum total that could never be captured. so obviously cf: picasso, art is a lie that tells the truth, or herzog's ecstatic truth, beyond facts to convey spirit (i like this andrew marr article on being painted by hockney, actually countering the capacity of photography in this respect, but about capturing something nonetheless (also has a precis of his fascinating secret-history stuff about camera lucidas & the old masters). there's this chris fujiwara thing about contemporary cinema i just read:

Contemporary art film has its already established dominant traditions, the main one being the extending of photographic realism to the hallucinatory degree where the image is so saturated with reality that the viewer becomes aware of being faced with a gallery-installation subversion of documentary realism that throws the construction of reality back on the viewer

which i thought about a lot & names a thing i hadn't quite understood the process of, & seems relevant. i go back and forth when i think of someone like eggleston, in whose photos there is a simultaneous unreality - shit just isn't that vivid; it just isn't that focal in anyone passing's actual vision!, and yet who seems to be able to fold a lot of actuality or truth or insight into the objects or people he's shooting (cf this is a fucking trike, even if the thing he was photographing was just a tricycle). & i also think that there's something about that physicality of photography in its backdrops; the presence of objects being in a certain time at a certain place is as close a thing as i can get to considering something 'objective' rather than subjective, & that photography collaterally captures that stuff on some sorta factual level is p interesting & significant i think (like i like this in films, just the fact of seeing a place not so much 'definitely as it was' but just probably 'in a way that couldn't be avoided', so even if you don't end up with something that conforms to a truth of geography you get the fact of the presence of things in the background).

aw thanks schlump I'm really just regurgitating what others have said ad infinitum and what is probably taught in any basic photography class. otm about eggleston, as much as people like to clown hipsters for latching onto him he really is unique, and stephen shore is no replacement. I bought this: for now but haven't had a chance to look at it and now probably won't get a chance until december but I'm stoked. and yeah, a close study of eggleston is a great way to learn about the differences between film rendering and digital rendering. 14 pictures was a mindblowing series when I looked at it, still is! the blue-ness of the fridge, the ice, the otherwordly antarctic in your kitchen.

and yeah as much as photography is an artifice, there is still the irrefutable immanence that you will never be able to erase, that some light at some location at some point in time was the catalyst for whatever photo you're looking at.

I agree with a lot of this, but I think broadly speaking you can still 'see' differences between lenses - like I shot with a modern 35mm biogon for a while and I can easily pick out the shots with that one versus the ones I took with an old canon RF 35mm from the 60s. if you stick with one film/developer combination and switch lenses, you should get sensitized to the differences over time.

ie Nikon 50/1.4D vs 50/1.4G vs 50/1.8D vs 50/1.8G vs the equivalent modern Canons - sample variation is probably going to be greater than any intrinsic difference between them. Aperture blades and their relation to bokeh might be noticeable (rounded highlights vs those with obvious edges) but that's sort of iffy, IMO.

oh yeah I totally agree, all digital lenses look the same. it seems to me that digital lenses differentiate themselves through 1. who can offer a bigger aperture through a bigger portion of the zoom range and 2. sharpness wide open. everything else is all much of a much-ness, really. they all seem to have the same character.

another aspect to think about with lenses is how the lens "draws." pretty much every lens outside of a 50mm for 35mm (and even then, there are a lot of different designs in the 50mm focal length) is going to be making some decisions on how to compress the field of view to fit on to that 24x36mm piece of film. some of them are 'well corrected' (i.e. no barrel distortion). some of them aren't. some of them will go for flatness of field (i.e. biogon) and some will go for a more 'rounded' look (i.e. leica designs). there's a ton of variables that go into lens design, nearly all of them invisible to dilettantes. the danger is, of course, becoming one of those people who obsesses over a single element of lens design (maybe bokeh?) and analyzes pictures based totally on that characteristic.