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).