Darkroom Upheaval

It's been a barely believable ten months since I last posted anything on The Online Darkroom so where should I start? Is an apology in order for the lengthy period away from the keyboard or would an explanation of what I've been up to suffice? Does anyone out there still care?

Quite a lot has happened here from a darkroom perspective in the last couple of months. Our 22-year-old daughter has moved back in with us (long story) and my darkroom made the ultimate sacrifice and was reborn as her bedroom. Well, what's a dad to do? So I've been drawing up plans to commandeer the downstairs WC as a temporary darkroom. Temporary as in "set it up" and "tear it down" every time I want to use it.

It'll work very well, I suspect, once a few amendments have been put in place. One of these (yet to be done) is to install a commodious Belfast or butler's sink atop the cupboard that will house my printing paraphernalia. The second was the purchase of a Nova 10x8 four slot processing tank that'll sit in the sink when I'm printing and replace a line of trays with a footprint four times bigger. Along with a removable shelf to perch the enlarger upon, that should see me back printing, hopefully in the New Year.

With the loss of the permanent darkroom has come the loss of the big, 5x4 format Durst L1200 enlarger, now sitting in storage along with the Leitz V35 and 1c enlargers that I've also no room for. Since I'll have to carry the enlarger into and out of the WC darkroom for each session, I'll be going with the tiny and lightweight Leitz Valoy II, my favourite of the bunch anyway. On-the-ball readers will have noticed by now that that means, when it comes to printing, restricting myself to 35mm, the biggest format the Valoy can accommodate.

Other things are being considered to make these changes as convenient as possible and make sure they work within the restrictions of a small house that has become somewhat smaller. Chief amongst these is the possibility - haven't made up my mind yet - of switching to Ilford XP2 for 35mm and medium format. I had thought about developing the C41 process XP2 but worked out that ten rolls would cost me about £30 to process myself or £35 to have AG Photographic do it for me. Given AG's reputation for good work, that's a no brainer for me.

That would mean I could put the film drying cabinet currently sitting in our bedroom in Cath's big summerhouse along with a box of developing bits and bobs. Although I wouldn't be able to print from my medium format negs with just the Valoy to hand, AG can provide a set of 6x4" prints from the 6x6 and 6x9 films I'd send them and also produce some higher quality scans than I can manage at home on my aged Epson scanner. These could be processed in Lightroom and bigger C-type prints made at reasonable cost if required.

This is all very well, I hear you say, but what were you up to in the months following your last post back in January? Photographically, not a huge amount if I'm being honest. I've exposed a few films and produced some prints I'm happy with. I also discovered Ilford RC Warmtone in the pearl finish which I developed in Fotospeed's WT10 Warmtone developer for a lovely look. It's so nice - and with the convenience of resin coated paper - that it's all I'll be using for the foreseeable future. Price-wise, it's somewhere between normal multigrade RC and MF FB. If Ilford could offer it on the heavier RC Portfolio paper base for the same price it would be just about perfect.

I've never been a fan of cold-toned prints and don't care too much for neutral ones either. I like a bit of warmth and that's what the RC Warmtone/Fotospeed WT10 pairing provides. If you have a copy of Fay Godwin's "Land" you'll see the kind of tone I'm after. If you haven't then this comparison will give you an idea. It's one of my warmtone prints adjacent to a pic in Fay's book. They're really quite similar in tone.

Prior to the RC conversion, I'd grown quite fond of Fomatone MG in fine grain, a very warm, fibre-based, variable contrast paper that seemed to suit the kind of images I like to take. But I then had a couple of boxes that were just not producing the goods - all flat and murky and not much contrast regardless of the contrast filter setting used. I grew tired of trying to produce decent prints from paper that was either stale or defective in some other way so I sadly and reluctantly gave it up. Here are a couple showing its good side.

It's warmth might be over the top for some tastes but I really liked it. The stippled surface is lovely as well. Just for fun, I scanned prints I'd made from Fomatone and a variety of papers in WT10 and then examined their RGB levels using the colour balance tool in Photoshop. The Fomatone's red channel was 6% higher than the other channels and the Ilford RC Warmtone 4% higher on the same channel. Ilford MG FB matt was 2% warm. With Fotospeed's own RC paper, the blue channel was 1% higher than the other channels.

These differences might not seem great but they are easily noticeable side-by-side. Here are RC Warmtone and the cooler Fotospeed for example. They were placed together on the scanner's platen and scanned at the same time so it's a good representation of the difference in tone.

Apart from revisiting old haunts with the camera, taking a short break on the Northumberland coast in October, becoming grandparents for the second time in April and our oldest dog, Molly, sadly reaching the end of the road at the start of this month that's about it. I'll post some more pics from earlier in the year later this week.

It would be good if this post heralded a return to more regular writing but I've made that promise before and not followed through on it so I'll just close for now with au revoir.