Six, not out

The business end of the darkroom just after a printing session

Well, here we go again. Another day, another darkroom. My sixth if I've tallied them up correctly. This latest one, which should be my last as we've no intentions of moving anywhere else in future, is the second smallest. The winner was the one I had in a cupboard in my parents' house when I was a teenager.

Although the room isn't huge, it does have a decent-sized, built-in wardrobe space. I've shelved that so that the big Durst L1200 can be hidden behind sliding doors along with all of the usual darkroom chemicals, measuring cylinders, dev tanks, etc. With the doors shut, there is no sign that the room is a darkroom - providing you're prepared to accept the Leitz Valoy II sitting out in full view on the worktop as a work of art instead of an enlarger.

The absence of a darkroom has been responsible both for my meagre output in photographic terms and the lack of posts on this blog. There just didn't seem much point in exposing more film for the sake of it when I had plenty of negatives that I still hadn't printed from. And this shortage of material meant I'd nothing much to write about on the blog. I finally started printing again last week after a lay-off of more than a year - more on that later.

However, things could have been so much more different after digital started making eyes at me again. It wasn't so much my idea as Cath's.

She said the darkroom would have made a nice, wee study but for all the enlarging paraphernalia. "Why not go back to digital?" she asked, eyelashes flapping wildly. "You could get a nice desk instead of kitchen units and set your hi-fi gear up and you could still do your photography on the computer. You could get one of the latest camera outfits."

Now, on it's own it's an innocent enough idea but I could see that she wasn't thinking so much about my creative welfare as having a room that could play a more mainstream role in the house. I could see the sense of it and even went as far as checking out some tasty digital cameras.

For a couple of days I contemplated the pros and cons of returning to digital. Of particular interest was a Panasonic bridge camera with a tremendous zoom range and image quality that would have equalled or bettered - at least according to what I read - 35mm quality. One camera and one built-in lens to do everything. It could hang in a holster-type bag on the back of the darkroom door and I could scoop it up in seconds if we were heading somewhere for the day. But then I realised that I could never get interested in digital again and was just wasting my time. So that idea was quickly ditched.

Cath was a little disappointed so I said I'd do my best to stop the room looking and smelling like a photo lab. So it's odourless this and odourless that rather than the good, old smell of fixer in the morning. The darkroom isn't the finished article yet because that takes time. I'm getting there, though - and at least it's functional.

As I was saying, last week I decided to start printing again and had the usual "teething" troubles - something that plagues me after a long lay-off. It's normally compounded by my belief that, in the intervening period, the RH Designs Analyser Pro* I have has morphed into something that I can actually use, even though I couldn't the last time I gave it a go. So I had the usual two printing sessions of trying to make it work before getting a little bit miffed and consigning many sheets of paper to the bin.

To my shame, I've still got four enlargers on the go despite promising to sell one or two (I blame Covid but Cath seems to think it's something to do with the word "laziness". I'll never understand women.) so I started back printing with the Leitz V35 and then replaced it with the company's earlier 1C when the analyser and I were having a problem "communicating", as marriage guidance counsellors seem to put it nowadays. My efforts using the 1C weren't much better. The prints I was getting weren't too bad but they were difficult negatives and I couldn't get the final prints done to my satisfaction.

At times like these, I call on the services of my sympathetic and much more effective counsellor - Phil Rogers. I moaned the face off him in a couple of lengthy emails, culminating in my threat to buy a Heiland Splitgrade outfit for the V35 unless he could sort me out.

Phil hates split grade printing more than I hate digital so that was all it took. His sage advice (paraphrasing), "Look baldy, it's not rocket science. Get off yer fat arse, ditch all this hi-tech crap, look up "test strip" in your photography encyclopaedia and get stuck in, you useless waste of space." He's an advocate of the tough love school of counselling. That did the job. The analyser has reverted to being an excellent test strip maker and timer, I'm using the very basic Leitz Valloy II and the 50mm Focotar and am glad to say that most of the prints I've since produced have been very nice. So that's me sorted. Cheers, Phil!

Keeping the waste of paper to a minimum while I dial myself in again, I've mainly been using some Kentmere VC Select in 5x7 size. It's actually quite nice as far as RC goes. The prints are very punchy and the surface doesn't look too plasticky. However, I also got a box of 5x7 Fomatone MG Classic fibre-based paper with the "velvet" 133 surface and that's really lovely. The surface is similar to the old Agfa Record Rapid 119 lustre which was my favourite. The pebbly grain is a little smaller than the RR finish but it still has that appealing sparkle when it catches the light.

The image tone in Fotospeed's warmtone print developer is a very warm browny-black which I like. I'm not too sure if I'm wild about the yellowish paper base. It actually looks good when a print is viewed in isolation but next to the bright whiteness of the Kentmere it looks almost jaundiced. Have a look at these and see if you agree. Two Fomatones first of all.

So that's where I am at the moment - printing some negatives I've taken over the last few years and just enjoying being in the darkroom again. The Valoy II is, in my opinion, the best 35mm enlarger of them all and the Focotar lens - the one with the large front element - is as good as it gets as well.

So far, I've been entirely satisfied with the technical quality of the prints from the 35mm negatives, although I've not gone bigger than about 6x9". Once I've had a chance to catch up on the backlog of negatives, I'll be out and about again with a camera and, hopefully, I'll have some more subjects to write about here.

* The analyser is a great bit of kit - it's the operator who can't do it justice.