20 Oct 09: Darkroom workshop #4: Enlarging

We started by reviewing our negatives using a  light box.

 Having selected a negative to print this is loaded into the negative holder (emulsion side down).  The negative tray is then loaded into the enlarger, taking care not to scratch the diffuser.

(Meograde enlargers)

Last week when we were contact printing we only adjusted the aperture and timer on the enlarger.  This week we also adjusted the contrast.  This can be changed in half stops from 0 (low/soft) to 5 (high/hard).  We set the contrast to 2.5.

Using black and white film you have some exposure latitude with a tolerance around 1 stop under to 1.5 stops over.  When working with film you should aim to expose for shadows and develop for highlights (with digital photography you have to expose for highlights as if these are lost in digital shooting you can't get them back).

On the enlarger the density controls the bulb brightness - we set this to zero.

The easel was set for the paper size - we were printing 4 inch square

The aperture was set at f11.

As the enlarger warms up the focus can change so we used a focus finder over the print to ensure that the print was correctly focused (you can just see the film grain when the focus is correct).

We did a test print with different exposure levels in 2 second intervals from 2 secs to 10 secs.  Fibre based paper darkens by about 10% as it dry so it is necessary to allow for this in choosing the exposure time.

As we were using fibre paper the developing times had to be adjusted:
Developer - 3 mins
Stop - 1 min
Fix - 3 mins
Water wash - 5 mins

This was my first test print.

I printed with an exposure time of 4 seconds:

I then tried a test print on a second negative.  The first attempt at f/8 came out very dark and a second test was done - this was supposed to be at f5.6 but I adjusted the aperture the wrong way and came out with a very dark test.

Unfortunately at this point we had run out of time but attempts to get this right should follow at a future date....