My first wet session

After buying a small kitchen table from Ikea on the weekend I finally had a home for my enlarger, almost there... Post moving stuff around in the office and I found myself on the verge of my first printing session left with only having to sort out the chemicals before I could really get my hands wet. Skip forward 30 mins or so and I was there, the room fully blacked out and the developer, fixer and stop bath waiting to be christened.

My first task was to test the safe-light, basically making sure that it wasn't going to fog the paper. So I placed a new sheet of paper on the enlarger easel and then placed a few coins on top of that. The basic premise is that if, after you've developed the sheet, there are any shapes showing up then your safe-light is too close to you enlarger or processing trays. Luckily for me it came out white.

The next step was to actually put a negative in the holder and make a test print. Another piece of paper was placed under the enlarger and strips of the negative are exposed in 3 sec intervals using a bit of card to cover up section after section. Below is the result.


Judging from the test print I decided that 18 seconds was the optimum time (just past mid way on the test strip shown above). So I set my timer to 18 seconds and exposed a fresh sheet of paper, resulting in this:

Now I've got my first printing session under my wings I am much more confident about the whole thing. I want to revisit the above negative, print it at a slightly higher contrast and maybe burn in the cliff face (after receiving some advice from a fellow forumite).

I've bought an enlarger... Probably not the type you are thinking

After having my eye on picking up an photographic enlarger for some time and going through a few attempts on eBay to no avail, I finally managed to win an auction. To my utter amazement I paid a lot less than I had expected to. By the time the auction had finished I had only to part with 63 of our shiny English pounds, for which I bagged:

LPL C7700 6x7 enlarger with a basic timer
50mm Schneider Componon S f/2.8
50mm EL-Nikkor f/2.8
80mm Rodenstock Rodagon f/5.6
An 11x14 easel (a biy rusty)
35mm contact proofer
8x10 paper safe
2 safelights
3 focus finders
2 Paterson dev tanks with spirals
2 Paterson PCA 2060 colour analysers
A set of 8x10 developing trays
2 sets of 11x14 trays, a set a size up from that and another set a size up again.

And that's the stuff that I'm keeping/going to use, there are a few other items that are incomplete like a couple of dev tanks that don't have lids and some measuring cylinders that are a bit too dirty to be able to salvage.

Another added bonus was that even though I had to pick up the items from the seller, he lives in Bournemouth so Me and the wife had an excuse to visit the mother-in-law for the weekend, which is always nice. The guy who had sold me this equipment turned out to be a really nice guy who gave me much more stuff than I had expected (see here for the eBay auction description).

Along with this little treasure trove I have picked up a 105mm Nikkor which will nicely cover my 6x7 negatives (the 80mm that he gave me seems to do the job pretty well though). I have bought some paper/developer and some print tongs and have some blackout material coming in the post so I can use my office as a temporary darkroom for a little while.

Talking about darkrooms, I am in process of (very early stages) partitioning half of the attic off so I can turn that into a permanent darkroom, hopefully I can get everything I need (mainly electricity and a sink) up in there so I won't have to worry about messing around with hoisting buckets of water up and down ladders.

Hopefully I will be able to make my first prints by the end of the week.