I love this entry of Jessamyn's, and I have always wanted to write an answer entry to it, because my way of working in the darkroom is so completely different than hers.

Part of it is that we had different teachers and were trained differently, part of it is that I have to pay for my darkroom time and must maximize the number of shots I can do in the seven hours I am there, part of it is that everyone must find their own journey, grasshopper, and part of it, most of it, is that I have been doing it for longer and I have shortcuts.

Although I must say that I started with the shortcuts almost immediately after learning to do things the long way. I think that I only ever did the thing where you stripe the exposure, making it longer and longer in stripes down the test print to choose your exposure, I think I did that twice. Maybe three times. When the teacher stopped needing to look at it, I stopped doing it.

A few words about my teacher, actually. Her name was Tree, that was the whole thing, no last name, and she was wonderful. I absolutely worshipped her. I see, looking here, that she is still teaching at the New School, and I'm so glad, as she was about the perfect teacher for BW Photo I. I also see that the teacher that I hated, that I had for BW Photo II is still there. No link for him!

Tree is a glorious teacher in that she helps everyone find their way. He Who Shall Remain Nameless is a horrible teacher because he helps everyone find his way, no matter how awkwardly it fits. I will say, though, that He is a reasonably good photographer (though I didn't admire His work nearly as much as He did), and He certainly has His share of acolytes, I just don't like being looked down on because I am not one of them.

So this is my journey.

I take the van into the city and go downtown to my darkroom. I have only ever worked in this one, besides the one at school, and am very attached to it, not only because I like everyone who works there, but because the owner has a crush on me and lets me run a tab.

I have a locker there where I keep all of my equipment, my paper and filters, my loose-leaf binders filled with negatives and contact sheets, my notebooks filled with timings and exposures. If the place ever burned down, I would be completely fucked.

I am buzzed in and exchange pleasantries with the deaf guy at the counter. They are brief, since I have forgotten most of the ASL that I used to speak reasonably well, but I think that he likes it that I make an effort. I fill out my equipment needs, the lens (50mmfor 8x10s or 75mm for 5x7s), the negative carrier (filed), the grain focusser, the four way adjustable easel, the glass for making contact sheets and, most importantly, the clock radio. My laptop is in the shop, so no DVDs this time, gotta have the radio.

I also give him my film to develop while I'm there, as I never develop my own film. Nothing is more tedious than developing negatives, and I am very likely to do it badly, so I have it done for me, but I cut them myself, because I prefer the five across and seven down negative sleeves, and mostly people automatically cut in rows of six. Tree liked the five and sevens, and have never found a reason to use anything else.

I gather everything, then stagger to the room that I have rented, stopping at my locker to get my personal supplies. It's best when they are full and they let you have the big room at the regular rate, as you can actually walk around in that one, but barring a rush, I am in one of the tiny rooms.

I hang my coat behind the door, put the glass and my paper and current binder on the lower shelf, my bag with my filters and notebooks on the left of the enlarger, the easel under and the lens in the enlarger, the grain focusser to the right, and, most importantly, plug in the radio, set the time and turn on CBS-FM.

I also take off my sweater and plug in the fan, as it's awfully warm and I'm all dressed like it's winter. I don't mind working in my bra, it's not as though anyone will come in, I just need to not get so comfortable that when I go out to wash my prints I don't forget to put it back on!

I have to wait a bit before my new negatives are ready, so I have a glance through my last batch of contact sheets. They are mostly JournalCon and Statics and Dynamics, and I decide to blow up a bunch of those to give away to the people in them.

I go back out to the counter to trade my 50mm lens for a 75mm, because I have decided to do 5x7s. The last time I was in I bought all new paper, so I have lots. I don't like buying paper there, because it's pricy, but if I cannot plan ahead enough to go to B&H before I run out, I have to pay the piper.

So I set the lens to 8, a nice middle number to work with, and take the neg I have chosen from the sleeve. I am reasonable careful to handle it by the edges, but I'm not hysterical about it.

I was very interested when Jessamyn said that she cleans the neg with alcohol and blows it with a blower. I have never done anything like that, you know what I was taught to do? Run the strip between my fingers. Yes, that's right, you hold your first and second fingers straight and close together and then pull the neg through like it's going through a wringer. Gets the dust off! If it's a messy negative for some reason, I do have a dust-free cloth, but I rarely use it.

O, and you know a trick for when there is a scratch on the neg? Nose grease. Run your finger over the side of your nostril, then rub the grease onto the scratch, it fills it perfectly and won't show up in the print. Just a little tip from me to you. Or from Tree to you, really.

Anyway, I run the neg through my fingers, and place it upside down in the carrier. The lens works like your eye, reversing the image, so if you place it upside down, it projects right side up on the paper. I like a messy border, so I use a filed carrier--it doesn't come right up to the edges of the neg, it shows the edges, so I have to hold it up to the light to make sure that all four edges are pretty evenly represented.

Then I take out one of my templates. I have templates for all different border that I like to use, pieces of photo paper that I put into the adjustable easel and adjusted the borders to my liking, then exposed it to light and developed it like a photo, so that I can replicate even borders every time without having to dick around with them. Also, I can use the opposite side as a focussing sheet.

I set my borders, then turn off the overhead so that I can focus. I raise or lower the enlarger so that it is projecting an image of the size that I want my picture to be, then turn the knob so that it is sharp. I use the grain focusser, a little microscope thing that shows the grains large enough that I can do a really clear focus, though I can usually eyeball it pretty closely.

Then I turn off the focussing light, take a handful of paper out of the box and put it into the paper safe. This is a box that lives in the darkroom so that you can get at your paper easily but safely without having to muck around with the box it is kept it in.

Then I need to decide what exposure to use. I usually have a pretty good idea of what will work, and if I'm low on paper or feeling really sharp I will just make a damn print, but that is so tiresome when it ends up being off, that I will take a piece of photo paper and tear it into four or eight pieces to use for test. The piece can be really small and as long as you put it on the important part of the image, you can get the right exposure.

I put my 3 1/2 filter into the enlarger, because that is my favourite filter, and it's nearly always the right one for my purposes, then put a test square on the easel. Depending on the thickness of the neg, I usually start with an exposure of 5 to 8 seconds. I expose it, then drop it in the developer. There is a clock on the wall, but I cannot spend seven hours in the darkroom staring at the sweep hand, so I use the enlarger for my timing--set it to 90 seconds, then sit and try to read by the light coming through the negative. Not easy, but better than straining my eyes trying to use the safe light to read by.

Of course, you are supposed to agitate the prints in the developer, but my Christ, I cannot be bothered, I just make certain that the paper is completely covered with the developer by slipping it in by the edge rather than dropping it flat into the bath. One quick stir and you're good to go. Or good to sit on the stool and try to read by the enlarger light.

When the 90 seconds is up, I take the test out of the developer with the tongs and drop it into the stop for 15 seconds, agitating with the stop tongs because I can do that for 15 seconds without getting too bored, then I drop it in the fix and turn on the light. It needs to stay in the fix for 3-5 minutes (though usually I leave them in for ages because I forget what time I put them in and it doesn't really matter), but it's safe in the light right away. Then I put it in another tray of water until I am ready to wash it.

A few words about tongs. I always use the tongs. Some photographers stick their hands in the chemicals, and really, they are nothing like as toxic as the chemicals used in colour photography, but the one thing that Tree drummed into out heads is that the skin is the largest organ in your body, and why would you want to soak it in chemicals for hours and hours, for days on end?

And, either more or less importantly, depending on your point of view, the chemistry of your hands can change the chemicals so that they are no longer doing the same thing, and then all of your timing is off. I think she put it better than that, but the point is, don't slosh around in the chemicals if you can avoid it, and don't mix your tongs, either, have three pair, one for each bath.

Anyway, after tonging everything within an inch of its life I have a glance at the test and check how it looks, is it too dark, too light? If it's too light, it needs more light, something that I couldn't get into my dyslexic head until it was explained to me that it's like getting a suntan, the more light, the darker you get!

If it's right, I make a full-sized print using those specs, and if not, I decide what the adjustment should be, 2 seconds more, 1 second less, whatever. I do not have truck with fractions of seconds. Unless the negative is horribly underexposed and needs a very little amount of time, the difference between one second and half a second is invisible to the naked eye. There are some really obsessive-compulsive photographers out there, believe you me.

Once I have decided the exposure, I write it down in my notebook. I have about five of them, one sheet of paper is for one negative sheet, all of which are numbered, of course, and there are two lines per negative, though sometimes I make things in different ways and different sizes so they need more room. The top of the sheet looks like this:

Winchester/Wedding Dance	365

Which is the title or a description of the negs (sometimes if there's a really special photo there that I will need alot I put it in the title as well) and the negative page number, and the lines per negative looks like this:

That's the negative number, a description of the photo (when it's a page of identical shots that gets tricky), the size I printed it, and underneath the f-stop setting of the enlarger lens, at how many seconds and with what filter. If I need to do any burning or dodging (exposing part of the negative for longer than others) it says:

f8 @ 7" + 2" b on Kelly 3 1/2 fil 

This is all so that when I want to make another copy years from now, I'll have all of the info that I need! Except for the fact that every enlarger is different, so I really only have a good starting point.

Okay, maybe I'm one of those obsessive-compulsive photographers, just not about fractions of seconds, about important things!

After doing a few of those (they go pretty fast if I am blowing up several pictures that I took under the same conditions, once I have the specs, I can do them all without any testing or even looking at them and batch-develop), the negs that I brought in are probably ready, the deaf guy knocks on my door to let me know, and I knock back so he knows that I heard.

I go over to the machine where they are hanging from plastic things on clothespins, then cut them into fives and put them in my negative sleeves. Of course, when it's 36 pictures to a roll, 38 if I load it right to maximize, I have a couple left over, so I always use one sheet for the extras of several rolls. And I still prefer five and sevens, even if they are impractical!

I take them back to my room and make contact sheets by placing the sleeve on top of a piece of 8x10 paper and under the sheet of glass, then shining the light directly onto it, no easel, no negative carrier, no filter. Usually ten seconds is about right.

Then I tend to spend seven hours not doing the prints that I came in there to do and doing stuff that can wait, but that's just me.

The darkroom closes at 7p on the weekends, but you can print until 6p on fibre paper and 6.30p on RC, resin coated paper, which is faster than fibre, but doesn't last as long. I always use RC, because quantity is more important than quality, baby.

Anyway, because the washing and drying of the prints takes place in the common area of the darkroom rather than the tiny space you rent, you can do that bit after clocking out, so that's what that extra half hour is for.

I return all of my equipment, and remember to put my shirt back on, then get a white tray and carry my millions of prints to the wash. They need to go in for 3-5 minutes (no more or it dulls the prints) and I always put them in one by one so that I know that there isn't a leftover clump of fix on any of them.

Then I go to the desk and pay either my current bill or a former bill, depending on how flush I am and whether I bought too much paper that time. By then everything has washed and can be dried.

Drying is tedious, because I really have to pay attention and not splash and make certain that things are dry and don't stick together, but if there are other people drying, too, it's fun to peek at their prints. On the other hand, it's embarrassing if they are doing something really arty and I'm doing someone's dull headshots, but hey, I'm getting paid for mine, so there's nothing to be ashamed of.

So I put the prints one by one (or two by two with the 5x7s) into the dryer, which squeezes the water out and blows hot air on them and spits them out all lovely and dry at the other end. Or not, if I've put them in too close together, as I usually do. I test dryness with my lips, by the way, since they are much more sensitive to moisture than your fingers, and it's easier not to leave smudges if they aren't entirely dry.

Anyway, after hopefully no more than half an hour, or the staff are standing around you in a half-circle, tapping their feet and looking pointedly at their watches, I'm done and I limp out, shattered.

But with alot of good work done! Not the work that I meant to do, but good work nonetheless! Because the journey is worth taking, no matter what path I end up wandering down.

Today's horoscope:
An small, unexpected gift brightens your day. Generosity on your part gratifies a loved one.

One year ago today:
"No, well yes, but what I really need you to do is to not spend the entire day flirting. Or if you absolutely must flirt all day, try to work at the same time."

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Last Updated Wed 16 January 02:08:09 2002