Darkroom Printing - Step-by-Step Guide to Your First Print

I really like this clothesline. What's going on YouTube? It's about time you made your first print. I'm going to walk you through step by step, how to make your first print. So first let's go over just a few things that you're going to need. You are going to need an enlarger. An enlarge is very much like a reverse camera. Instead of sucking the light up in through the lens to the film, you're projecting back through the film down onto paper. So speaking of paper, you will need paper. If you're just starting out, I recommend using like a resin coated paper. It's just easier to work with, easier to learn, and more cost effective. And wherever the light hits the paper, it will turn shades of gray to black. Wherever light does not hit it, it will stay white. I'm going to have to move over here because the floor is really squeaky right there. And then you will definitely need three different chemicals. A developer, a stop bath and a fix. I recommend like Dectol or Ilford's multigrade developer. I use Ilford Ilfostop. It's an indicator stop bath. It's basically acetic or citric acid with an indicator dye in it. But all it really is is a dilute acid. So in a pinch, I've even used distilled vinegar, diluted 1 to 4. But the benefit of using one with an indicator dye is when it gets when it turns from acidic back to neutral or exhausted, it turns like a purple color. So it's nice to be able to see that. So the development process basically is alkaline and it needs to be alkaline to do its thing. And the stop bath neutralizes it and stops development. Then you will need a fixer. This once you've stopped the development, this takes the paper and clears any remaining silver, unexposed silver in it. And that will allow you to expose the paper to light without it having any reaction. So it kind of fixes it and makes it stable and light. Next, you are going to need trays for processing. I recommend four trays to start. You're going to need a tray for developer, the stop bath fixer, and then a water holding bath or washing bath. It's also really nice to have a set of print tongs. That way you're not bathing yourself in the developer stop and fix. You can use the tongs to take the paper from one to the next, but you need one for the developer, one for the stop, one for the fix. And try not to get this stuff Too contaminated. Get yourself some type of graduate or mixing cup. For years I just used ones that I purchased from like Walmart in the cooking section. But you're going to want to use something that's at least one liter. Most likely you're going to want to get some storage bottles of some kind. These are one liter amber. But you're going to want put your stop and fix in so that you can reuse those chemicals. So back over to the enlarger side. You will need a dark room timer of some sort, or at least I highly recommend one. You will also need an easel to place the paper in some scrap cardstock or mat board. This is just a mat board with a red amber, kind of the color of a safelight and white on the other side. And white's nice. So when you're underneath the enlarger you can see the image on it. So if you get something that's all black and becomes really hard to see what you're doing. So some cardstock or anything to kind of block light to make the test strips and do different things. And we'll show you that notebook or a print log sheet. You're definitely going to want to start taking notes and getting organized. Do this right from the beginning. I really prefer a darkroom log sheet, something that I can store with my negatives. I have a ton of notebooks in here and 90% of what's in all of them. I have no idea what it's from or what it really means not to say that taking notes in a notebook or I even. You'll even see. I jot tons of things down like on my burn cards when I'm going. But it's really nice to have one spot to take all your notes from start to finish, especially when you get a final print. It really, really helps you look, learn and progress in the darkroom. I can't stress this enough. If you don't know what you've done, you can't repeat it. And I have oodles and oodles. Oodles. I have so many prints where I look at them and I love them. But I don't remember exactly how I got that tone or how I got that contrast. And I wish I had a print log for it. So start this from the beginning. You can check out the description below. I have a darkroom print log along with a mini course showing how I did it and some behind the scenes on how I use it to print other pictures. You're going to want a scissors or a paper cutters to cut paper in the darkroom to make some test strips with. And you will also need some contrast filters or multi grade filters. That is how you change the contrast of the paper of multigrade paper which we will be using. And I recommend you start out with, I recommend you getting a piece of acrylic and like a quarter inch acrylic. And that will work really nice as a viewing board. So you want to get one about a size bigger than you plan on printing. I got mine from just the local home improvement store. And then get yourself a print squeegee AKA I've used windshield wipers for years and they work pretty darn good. So stop at the auto store too while you're at it. You don't have to have running water in the room that you're in. It is a really, really nice to have, but you definitely should have access to running water somewhere so you can, you know, bring your last tray in and out, rinse it, do what you got to do. Another nice to have is some ND filters or some ND filter gel. And I use this to kind of block light the same as you would on a camera to kind of dull down the light to give me more time under the enlarger. A grain finder to get precise for focusing. Oh yeah. One more thing you're going to need actually two more things. You're going to need a dark room to do all of this in. You're going to have to block out all the light in an area so that you can set this stuff up to do it in. And in that room you'll also need at least one safelight. Safe lights are amber or red in color and most photosensitive papers are just not sensitive to that spectrum of light. For this printing session I am using Decdol and and I recommend starting out with fresh chemicals. The chemicals are so much cheaper than the paper. Paper is by far the most expensive consumable. On top of that, if you want to save a ton of money, you can mix your own dactyl like from scratch chemicals and it becomes extremely inexpensive. So if that's something in the future that you're interested in doing, I have a whole darkroom formula book. You can also get that in the description below. So use good chemicals that aren't going to mess up your process and end up costing you more money in paper. So for the ductile, I'm mixing it one to two. So I'm mixing 300 milliliters of ductile to 600 milliliters of water to make 900 milliliters total. Then I'm using Ilford's stop bath and this says mix 1 to 19. I just put 50 mils into a liter of water. So I do reuse my stop bath and my fixer bath. For the fix, I'm using Ilford's rapid fixer. I like doing this. I only fix for one minute. This way you can either mix it film strength or one to nine. Next up, you're going to prep your negative and put it in your negative carrier. And you want to put that shiny side up and emulsion side down. And then you want to put it reverse how you want to see it on the easel because it's going to flip everything around. So put it in upside down when you're looking at it in the carrier. Putting it in. Get yourself a little tiny brush for removing dust off your negatives. This one's a little anti static one. You can use a camel hair brush. Really any kind of brush that's going to get the dust off your negatives. So once your negative is in the enlarger, what you want to do is open the lens all the way up. This is going to let you view the most and don't have any filters underneath or above. At this point you want to be able to see as much as you can. And then you're also going to put a scrap piece of paper, preferably a piece of photo paper, otherwise just a white paper so you can actually see what's going on. Next you're going to roughly adjust the height and focus of the enlarger to get that focused up. For this I did a six by nine print. So I roughed that in. And then once that looked really good, I took my grain finder and did a fine focus on it. Once everything is focused up and looking good, I recommend stopping the lens down at least one. One stop. The lens on your enlarger is very similar to any camera lens, as in it has a sharpest or prime aperture aperture that the image quality is going to be the best at. So if you can try to keep it at that aperture, this particular lens F4 is the best. So I'm going to stop it down one stop. With the multigrade filters, I usually like to start at about one to one and a half filter. You, you want to start a little bit on the softer side if you can. It's easier to increase contrast than it is to decrease contrast. So just remember that you want to build up the contrast if you can. Now once I have the negative setup, my chemical setup. Take a quick minute and just jot everything down from the enlarger that you're using. The enlarger height, the lens, the F stop, the filter that you're going to be using, the paper, the paper type, the developer, the developer dilution, the temperature, if you can. You want to have all this stuff recorded now, when you're fresh, because if you just start printing and printing, you'll get lost. And then later you're going to be tired and you won't write it down. Trust me, taking these notes is going to allow you to know how you got the results so that you can repeat them. So the first thing that we're going to do is make a test strip. Now, with experience, you won't really need test strips as much, especially once you've kind of looked at your contact sheet, looked at your scans, done a lot of printing. You'll just kind of know where to start by looking at how much light is pouring on the easel. But if this is your first time printing, you're going to want to make a test strip. And I recommend making a full sheet. But if you want to save money, you can go ahead and trim up some paper for an 8x10. I like to trim up 4 pieces, 2 inches by 10 inches. And this can be very effective as well. It just won't give you quite as much information, but you can definitely do it this way. Now, I shoot for a print time, usually starting between 10 and 20 seconds. And this is because you're going to want to have a little bit of time if you want to dodge and do any manipulations during the initial exposure. And then you can extend it if you need to. If you're down in like two, three seconds, like, you can't, you can't do anything. So I shoot for an exposure in that area, and there's a couple ways you can get there. Now, with this Bezler enlarger that I'm printing on, it's a condenser and the light is pretty bright. So what I do with this one is I put some ND gels in the filter stage above. It cuts the light down without me having to stop the lens down. So that allows me to keep the lens at f4. So I have two one stop sheets of ND filter in there. Right now I could just take my lens and stop it down from F4 to 5.6 to F8 and it would give me approximately the same light levels. But I know this lens is sharper at F4 than it is at F8. So I'm going to go ahead and put ND above. But either way, you're either through ND filters or by stopping down the lens, you're going to have to get that in the sweet spot to get the exposure where you want it. So now it's time to make the test strip. So set your timer to three seconds, and then get your piece of cardstock or something to block the light from the paper, and you're going to expose a little bit of the image, and you're going to hit the timer for three seconds, and then you're going to move it over about an inch to an inch and a half, and you're going to expose it for another three seconds and another three seconds and another three seconds, and you're going to do that seven times. That's going to give you exposures from three seconds to 21 seconds. So as you go, it builds up one on top of the other. So you'll have a strip with 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21. So then go ahead and take that test strip. Put it in your developer for one and a half minutes, rocking it gently, making sure that it is covered in developer and everything is flowing around it nice and evenly. After the test strip is in the stop for a minute and a half, pull it out with the tongs, let it drain for about 10 seconds, throw it in the stop bath. You're going to want to rock that back and forth for about 10 seconds, 10 to 15 seconds. Let that drain for about 10 seconds, then throw it in the fixer. If you're using a rapid fixer, it says 30 seconds. I like to keep it in there for a minute. And then after about 30 seconds, if you really want, and you're dying, you can turn the lights on. But wait that 30 seconds, go ahead and rinse it and dump it a few times, fill it with water, dump it a few times, come back, put that on your viewing board or the back of a tray and and squeegee it to look at it. What happens when there's water in the emulsion? It swells, and it can make the print look a little bit brighter than it actually is. So by squeegeeing it, it has a little bit better representation of what it will actually look like dried down. And on that note, when you are in the dark room, you are in the dark for a period of time, your eyes are going to open up and dilate. So if you just flip a really bright light source on and look at your print, it's gonna look brighter than it actually is because your eyes are just wide open. So some of this is related to like the dry down phenomenon. Some people say there isn't, some people say there is. I think there is. Paper does have a dry down, but not to the extent that we think. I think between water being in the emulsion, swelling the emulsion, and us just coming straight from the dark to really bright lights causes us to initially think the print is brighter than it actually is. And then over time it kind of gets darker. To combat this, I use like a 15 watt light bulb above my viewing board and above my fixer and rinse tray so that I turn that light on first. That way I'm not just blasted with tons of light. Then once my eyes get adjusted, I turn on the main light. And you'll even notice that when you're in the dark working on under safe lights, at first you can't see a thing, but the longer you're in there, your brain and eyes kind of adapt and then you start being able to see in the dark. So this little tip along with squeegeeing your print when evaluating will go a long way in helping you judge your prints and your exposure times. So we really want to approach paper exposure the opposite of how we approach negative exposure. So with a negative, you expose for the shadow and develop for the highlights, you develop for the contrast. Now with a print, you're going to want to expose the paper for the highlights and then adjust the contrast for the shadows. So in this test print, the 15 seconds looks really good to me. And that's what I'm going to start with. And I'm actually going to back it off one second. And the reason I'm going to do that is because when we did the test strip, we did a series of exposures, 3, 3, 3, up to 15 seconds, that start and stop kind of breaks the inertia. So you have to, you want to back if it, if it looks perfect at a certain one, you want to back it off just a little bit. So I'm going to print this for 14 seconds with the same filtration at the same F stop that I have everything written down at. And I'm also going to jot on my notes real quick a 14 second exposure. So when I'm working, I like to keep notes as I go. Then we're going to develop stop and fix. And I think this print looks really good as a start print. I like the overall global contrast. There are some areas that I want to manipulate and what I'm going to do is plan out another video showing how I would just easily dodge and burn this to even make it look better. So watch for that video. That will be the next one that I'm going to make and I will see you then. Hey, are you brand new to darkroom printing? Or maybe your prints are not turning out leaving you stuck, frustrated and confused? Well, I've created a really simple solution to help you create great looking prints. This is a really easy, easy to use print log and corresponding mini course to help you take your prints from mediocre and dull to glowing pieces of art. This quick mini course will take you from confused about where to begin to confident in your process, from unsure of the proper contrast to use to getting it dialed in fast. Ultimately it will save you time, money and paper. So let's get you from an unorganized mess. Stop it. Get some help to having a proper organized workflow where you can track your results and make some real progress. Also, it's 100% risk free, so if you are unsatisfied in any way, just let me know and I will gladly refund your money. Just on a random note, this I was walking to my studio. I walked down the main street here and I'm not sure like there was just this dude sleeping on a couch outside the gas station and I had my little Olympus tiny little rangefinder on me and I was like oh man. And I took the picture and I really like it, but I'm confused as if like if the couch was there and he walked along and laid on it and if the couch was there, how did it get there? Did someone dump the couch off? Or if maybe he was like overstayed his visit and someone took him and the couch and dumped it there. I'm not sure. I'm still not sure what to make of this. Sam.