Darkroom portraits

[Stephen Frizza]

Ic-racer the darkroom setup looks awesome I love Durst CLS 2000's. Are you only doing Black and White work or Colour as well?

[ic-racer]

Ic-racer the darkroom setup looks awesome I love Durst CLS 2000's. Are you only doing Black and White work or Colour as well?

All 4 of my enlargers have dichroic heads, primarily to use multigrade B&W material.

[Tom Kershaw]

ic-racer,

The other enlargers are 4x5" Omega models?

Tom

[Henry Alive]

This is my new darkroom, and even though the area is exactly the same than always, I have introduced some improvements. First of all, I have put a wood sink that my brother Saver made for me. It is 1.75 m x 0.65 m x 0.20 m. It has a lot of special resin layers and it has been reinforced with fibber glass. Second, I bought the 12x16 Nova Washmaster-ECO Archival Print Washer and I put it on a metal support above the sink, just at the right hand. Notice that the water do not drain trough the sink, as the hoses go directly to the drain pipe. In third place, I have put a ventilation system. I used a vent that can move more than twenty times per hour the total volume of the darkroom (Just in case, this is the vent I bought: Soler & Palau TD-350/125 SILENT). The air is exhausted trough plastic pipes directly to the backyard. I also bought a 12x12 Doran Heavy Duty Darkroom Light Tight Louvers in Adorama, and I put it at the door.
I keep the rest of the equipment: Meopta Opemus 6 printer, RH Designs Analyser Pro, etc.
Now, I am able to print both RC and Fiber Paper. My Meopta can print as big as12x16, and I can put four trays inside the sink, so I can work with two fixer baths when I make 12x16 baryta base printers.
I am annexing some pictures in order to show you how my new darkroom looks like. They are not very good, but you can see how the sink looks like, the dry side and the wet side, the washer support, the ventilation system, and what things are located just under the sink.
Finally, I want to thank all of you that gave me ideas about how to ventilate my room when I asked for help to the forum, and mainly to my brother Saver, who made the wood sink and help me to put everything in its place.

[ic-racer]

ic-racer,

The other enlargers are 4x5" Omega models?

Tom

Yes, there are two D5500. Boy those looked big until I got the Durst. Now they look small .

On is set up for minox through 35mm. The other is set up for 6x6cm through 4x5in.

Also, there is a Minolta 6x7 enlarger I set up for my kids.

[fotch]

That is a nice darkroom Henry.

[Worker 11811]

I like the photos on the wall. Nice touch.
I think I'd like to get a cork board on the wall to tack photos on.

Photos in a darkroom create a good mood and act as inspiration, IMHO.

[Ken N]

I like the photos on the wall. Nice touch.
I think I'd like to get a cork board on the wall to tack photos on.

Photos in a darkroom create a good mood and act as inspiration, IMHO.

More importantly, they provide a "point of reference". When working a print you can compare your wet work print to the reference prints on the wall to make sure that your eyes aren't deceiving you and you end up with a too dark or too light print. There should be one reference print of each style of image (portrait, high-key, low-key, straight landscape, street scene, etc.) on the wall near your development trays. They don't need to be the world's best photos, but they do need to have the representative tones you are seeking in your work.

Once you have your wet work print matching your reference print, then just dial in your drydown compensation for the final print.

A few of us did a print exchange recently which I'm impressed with the tonalities of several of the prints--tonalities which I'm wanting to mimick in some of my own work, so those prints will be going up on the wall in my new darkroom.

I've known of photographers to keep a binder with reference prints in, but that just seems to take away from the glance up and down ease of prints on the wall.

[David Brown]

I have finished the construction phase of my new darkroom. I am now starting to install the equipment.

I own a swing-lens panoramic camera. I had never shot color film before with this camera until I decided to do some documentation of the darkroom construction. I had to wait until I finished up the roll and then got it processed. I am just not very practiced at scanning and I am afraid that the results are disappointing. Never mind the color balance from the different lighting. But here they are anyway to show some before and after. My analog printing is much better and that is why I'm building the darkroom!

All this is being documented in painfully boring detail in the blog in my signature.

[clayne]

David, that is God's darkroom. Massive.