In the fall of 1974 I became the school's photographer...after having been to one photo club meeting plus the teacher left after the spring term of '74. I was on my own. The darkroom was in the Janitor's closet. Camera was a Pentax K-1000 and this was sweet.
I love the retro posts! I started as an assistant in the 80's and I remember things we used to need to do in the studio that we never have to do now with digital. Making the studio totally dark,and pooping the strobe 32 times in order to get a product shot all in focus at f22 on 8x10 film if anyone walked in the studio and the floor shook we had to start again. You should do a studio episode
Interesting... So basically in-camera focus stacking. I've never heard anyone talk about that technique. Would be interesting to see someone make a video on giving it a shot.
Coming from 1972 I am surprised that Meyers didn’t mention dodging and burning. Porcelain lined darkroom trays were still somewhat in use in the early 70s being preferred by shooters who held on to their old reliables.
The glue on Post-its comes close to material used for the Sticky Easel. I use this myself to stick photopaper in glass plate holders for papernegatives.
I like using contact prints as an index page for what's on the negatives. Instead of the traditional method of an 8x10 print though, I use a DSLR w/ 50mm lens on a copystand over a lightbox to shoot the entire negative sheet. They are then just printed with a laser printer and stored with the negative holder in a 3 ring binder. These 'contact' sheets are no good for assessing image quality but they are quick to make and extremely helpful when search through negatives to find a particular image or event, without needing to remove each negative sheet and put it over the light box.
I filter my fixer through cotton-wool and a funnel super cheap and gets rid of those white specks. Distilled water super important for me at least in Austria where water is high quality but full of limescale. That pre-flash might be very useful for some old Forte paper I have it, it takes 160s at 5.6 to get a print! which is insanely long.
I don't make contact prints often because it's expensive. But I think they still have a place - you can tell your exposure, choose what you want to enlarge at a glance, whether you need filters, and see where you'll have to dodge or burn. Sharpness is probably the only thing you can't tell right away with the contact sheet.
Hey Azriel, great tips. On the filtration I use Make-up remover pads along with coffee filters. This is a practice I picked up from filtering my Silver nitrate for wetplate. The double filtration may be a bit overkill, but it cuts down my filtration time if you find your filtering more than 2 times. Keep the awesome vids coming. I really enjoy your content.
Interesting video and mostly good ideas, but there are a few that are plain wrong. 1) A contact sheet may not tell you much about sharpness but it will tell you a lot about exposure in camera and contrast in development, as well as the relative visual impact of similar images. They also make searching for a negative 1000X easier. 2) paper develops "to completion". You don't control contrast by varying a print's development time - that leads to weak blacks and uneven tones. You develop fully and change contrast with different contrast filters or different grades of paper. 3) Silver stains in a developing tray have absolutely no negative effect on prints. Any possible silver contamination gets washed away in the fixer. So A+ for the video, B- for that article from the 70s.
For a lot of my generic darkroom supplies (storage bottles, graduated cylinders) I've found Grainger in the US to be a good resource. Good prices, good products, and there's probably a local branch close by.
Good video - again! One of the biggest sources of dust is clothes, so as a bare minimum roll up your sleeves, or even remove your shirt entirely. Maybe The Naked Photographer has found the perfect solution to this problem. ;-) Also, I wonder if something like dilute nitric acid would remove silver from stained dishes.
11/11/21 In my darkroom I keep it rather bright for printing black and white printing. My overhead lighting is a Florence tube covered with ruby red litho film. The 2 faucet setup is perfect for all your water needs and a thermometer that fits on one of the faucet will help you in mixing the temp to what you need. Darkroom printing was where you go to chill out.
Very good video. I thought the idea of drying film in a clothes hanger is really an excellent idea. Dust is always the bane of my darkroom work. Also, I appreciate the presentation on pre-flashing. It is really useful. Just this morning I printed a high contrast negative of a street scene. A lot of the details of the houses and cars were washed out while other areas were just right. I think pre-flashing might have been a good solution. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Try Comet to clean trays or steel wool. Use marbles to raise your fluid levels to make chemicals last longer. Use alcohol to clean every thing before reuse . Paint glass 1 liter bottles flat black to protect chemicals and buy a soap stone to mark these bottles as it wipes off easily.
For removing the silver in the trays, I heard that BLIX does a fantastic job at that. If not, Farmer's Reducer should do the trick, especially if followed by fixer and a good rinse. What I don't like about the silver polish is that it's abrasive in nature. You could also try simple household bleach. It will oxidize and strip out the silver on a print so it should work just fine on that tray (it used to be a trick used by wedding photographers for making the white backgrounds and spotting pinholes on prints). As for the sticky easel, there are some re-positionable spray adhesives made by 3M. Also, post-it glue would be a great option as I think it's available in double side tape format.
@@AzrielKnight To be more specific, it is bleach-fix. In color process, you must remove all silver from the emulsion. As you know, bleach converts metallic silver back to silver halides, and fixer makes the salts soluble in water As the stains in bottles and trays are mosty silver, this trick will work. Of course, if you haven't cleaned your equipment in 10 years, it won't help,
I am a serious photographer and took darkroom courses at LACC and Santa Monica College in the 1990s and have a home darkroom with 2 4x5 enlargers. I learned a lot on the online forums in the early 2000s when many of the serious photographers and Kodak retirees were still around. Analogue photography made its peak in the 1990s I feel. The loss of Cibachrome was an absolute travesty. Technology does not always advance forward. Even the best inkjet prints look sick in comparison to Cibachrome prints . As far as these 10 tips - the most ridiculous is the no contact sheets tip. It came out of Lucifer’s Photography division along with “throw away your negatives after you make your first print” and “squeegee your wet film to help it dry quicker” 😊
Kodak dark green filter: I have only seen this somewhat successfully used in one darkroom. For tanks there were three pvc pipes. You turned off the lights, unrolled the film, put a heavy clip on the bottom and hung the film inside the developer filled tank. Then you could pull the film out and check it with the dark green safelight. You learned what good negs looked like. Expensive, lots of chemicals used. It did save some rolls. It was very fast, but you worked in the dark. The time it took to move the film from the pvc pipe of stop bath or fix was seconds.
So I think the “Sticky Easel” was probably made with this wax based graphic designer’s mounting tack that was quite easily found well up into the early 2000’s. It was a temporary or “repositioning” mount that came on plastic sheets. I remember calling it “sticky tack” when I was in art school but I doubt that was its brand name. I could even be wrong about that. Lol art school seems like a lifetime ago. I tried to find some on the internet to post but it seems that it is no more now that no one is doing graphic design “by hand” anymore. Rather the computer has become master of the field and the old “hand” materials are not being produced
The first comment did not take for whatever reason maybe because I included a link. The product I used in my early days as an engineer when we had to paste Polaroid oscilloscope photographs into engineering notebooks was called 3M Spray Mount Adhesive. I think they added the words repositionable to the product description today. You’ll know it when you see it any art supply store has it for about $10 a can. It’s approximately as sticky as a Post-it note.
Very interesting content. I built a basic darkroom as a teen back in the mid 70's. One critical observation, the red on red text slides you used here just don't work...
I regularly filter the fixer with coffee filter, especially the fixer I use for film negatives. For paper negatives, I use the solution of 2 fixers, one to take the dirt for half of the time then the print is soaked in a much cleaner fixer. Later my clean fixer is my "dirty" fixer and I use clean and fresh chemicals in my second. @PictorialPlanet recommends this, I also found this tip in a book about darkroom techniques.
In the fall of 1974 I became the school's photographer...after having been to one photo club meeting plus the teacher left after the spring term of '74. I was on my own. The darkroom was in the Janitor's closet. Camera was a Pentax K-1000 and this was sweet.
Ha! Great to see you working with TNP! Careful talking to him - you'll end up hooked on 8x10:)
And here I am 3 years after you posted this video of 50 year old tips, taking a break from building my darkroom with a cup of tea!
Good luck!
What kind of tea?
I love the retro posts! I started as an assistant in the 80's and I remember things we used to need to do in the studio that we never have to do now with digital. Making the studio totally dark,and pooping the strobe 32 times in order to get a product shot all in focus at f22 on 8x10 film if anyone walked in the studio and the floor shook we had to start again. You should do a studio episode
Interesting... So basically in-camera focus stacking. I've never heard anyone talk about that technique. Would be interesting to see someone make a video on giving it a shot.
Coming from 1972 I am surprised that Meyers didn’t mention dodging and burning.
Porcelain lined darkroom trays were still somewhat in use in the early 70s being preferred by shooters who held on to their old reliables.
The glue on Post-its comes close to material used for the Sticky Easel. I use this myself to stick photopaper in glass plate holders for papernegatives.
That's a good idea!
Nice and informative video!
This reminds I have to get a new bottle of distilled water!
I like using contact prints as an index page for what's on the negatives. Instead of the traditional method of an 8x10 print though, I use a DSLR w/ 50mm lens on a copystand over a lightbox to shoot the entire negative sheet. They are then just printed with a laser printer and stored with the negative holder in a 3 ring binder. These 'contact' sheets are no good for assessing image quality but they are quick to make and extremely helpful when search through negatives to find a particular image or event, without needing to remove each negative sheet and put it over the light box.
I filter my fixer through cotton-wool and a funnel super cheap and gets rid of those white specks. Distilled water super important for me at least in Austria where water is high quality but full of limescale.
That pre-flash might be very useful for some old Forte paper I have it, it takes 160s at 5.6 to get a print! which is insanely long.
I don't make contact prints often because it's expensive. But I think they still have a place - you can tell your exposure, choose what you want to enlarge at a glance, whether you need filters, and see where you'll have to dodge or burn. Sharpness is probably the only thing you can't tell right away with the contact sheet.
Hey Azriel, great tips. On the filtration I use Make-up remover pads along with coffee filters. This is a practice I picked up from filtering my Silver nitrate for wetplate. The double filtration may be a bit overkill, but it cuts down my filtration time if you find your filtering more than 2 times. Keep the awesome vids coming. I really enjoy your content.
Great tip!
Really enjoyed this one Az (I realise its a year old but you haven't aged a day ;) ) Nice to see the collaboration with TNP, I enjoy his work too.
Interesting video and mostly good ideas, but there are a few that are plain wrong.
1) A contact sheet may not tell you much about sharpness but it will tell you a lot about exposure in camera and contrast in development, as well as the relative visual impact of similar images. They also make searching for a negative 1000X easier.
2) paper develops "to completion". You don't control contrast by varying a print's development time - that leads to weak blacks and uneven tones. You develop fully and change contrast with different contrast filters or different grades of paper.
3) Silver stains in a developing tray have absolutely no negative effect on prints. Any possible silver contamination gets washed away in the fixer.
So A+ for the video, B- for that article from the 70s.
For a lot of my generic darkroom supplies (storage bottles, graduated cylinders) I've found Grainger in the US to be a good resource. Good prices, good products, and there's probably a local branch close by.
Good tip!
Good video - again! One of the biggest sources of dust is clothes, so as a bare minimum roll up your sleeves, or even remove your shirt entirely. Maybe The Naked Photographer has found the perfect solution to this problem. ;-) Also, I wonder if something like dilute nitric acid would remove silver from stained dishes.
11/11/21 In my darkroom I keep it rather bright for printing black and white printing. My overhead lighting is a Florence tube covered with ruby red litho film. The 2 faucet setup is perfect for all your water needs and a thermometer that fits on one of the faucet will help you in mixing the temp to what you need. Darkroom printing was where you go to chill out.
Thanks Robin!
Very good video. I thought the idea of drying film in a clothes hanger is really an excellent idea. Dust is always the bane of my darkroom work. Also, I appreciate the presentation on pre-flashing. It is really useful. Just this morning I printed a high contrast negative of a street scene. A lot of the details of the houses and cars were washed out while other areas were just right. I think pre-flashing might have been a good solution. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Thanks for the comment Tom, glad the tips helped.
Thanks for sharing these tips!
No problem :)
Try Comet to clean trays or steel wool. Use marbles to raise your fluid levels to make chemicals last longer. Use alcohol to clean every thing before reuse . Paint glass 1 liter bottles flat black to protect chemicals and buy a soap stone to mark these bottles as it wipes off easily.
This is awesome! Thanks for the much needed tips 😍 (for me, filtering out bits in the chems is particularly useful!)
Glad I could help :)
For removing the silver in the trays, I heard that BLIX does a fantastic job at that. If not, Farmer's Reducer should do the trick, especially if followed by fixer and a good rinse. What I don't like about the silver polish is that it's abrasive in nature. You could also try simple household bleach. It will oxidize and strip out the silver on a print so it should work just fine on that tray (it used to be a trick used by wedding photographers for making the white backgrounds and spotting pinholes on prints).
As for the sticky easel, there are some re-positionable spray adhesives made by 3M. Also, post-it glue would be a great option as I think it's available in double side tape format.
Undiluted RA-4 bleach concentrate works well for removing silver stains. It is also something I always have in quite large quantities.
Oh interesting!
@@AzrielKnight To be more specific, it is bleach-fix. In color process, you must remove all silver from the emulsion. As you know, bleach converts metallic silver back to silver halides, and fixer makes the salts soluble in water As the stains in bottles and trays are mosty silver, this trick will work. Of course, if you haven't cleaned your equipment in 10 years, it won't help,
I am a serious photographer and took darkroom courses at LACC and Santa Monica College in the 1990s and have a home darkroom with 2 4x5 enlargers. I learned a lot on the online forums in the early 2000s when many of the serious photographers and Kodak retirees were still around. Analogue photography made its peak in the 1990s I feel. The loss of Cibachrome was an absolute travesty. Technology does not always advance forward. Even the best inkjet prints look sick in comparison to Cibachrome prints . As far as these 10 tips - the most ridiculous is the no contact sheets tip. It came out of Lucifer’s Photography division along with “throw away your negatives after you make your first print” and “squeegee your wet film to help it dry quicker” 😊
Kodak dark green filter: I have only seen this somewhat successfully used in one darkroom. For tanks there were three pvc pipes. You turned off the lights, unrolled the film, put a heavy clip on the bottom and hung the film inside the developer filled tank. Then you could pull the film out and check it with the dark green safelight. You learned what good negs looked like. Expensive, lots of chemicals used. It did save some rolls. It was very fast, but you worked in the dark. The time it took to move the film from the pvc pipe of stop bath or fix was seconds.
Shall I re-iterate my "zone zero" method for determining print exposure? It was in a comment on another video.
So I think the “Sticky Easel” was probably made with this wax based graphic designer’s mounting tack that was quite easily found well up into the early 2000’s. It was a temporary or “repositioning” mount that came on plastic sheets. I remember calling it “sticky tack” when I was in art school but I doubt that was its brand name. I could even be wrong about that. Lol art school seems like a lifetime ago. I tried to find some on the internet to post but it seems that it is no more now that no one is doing graphic design “by hand” anymore. Rather the computer has become master of the field and the old “hand” materials are not being produced
The first comment did not take for whatever reason maybe because I included a link. The product I used in my early days as an engineer when we had to paste Polaroid oscilloscope photographs into engineering notebooks was called 3M Spray Mount Adhesive. I think they added the words repositionable to the product description today. You’ll know it when you see it any art supply store has it for about $10 a can. It’s approximately as sticky as a Post-it note.
Awesome thanks for sharing. Just fyi i didn't delete your msg. Must have been automatic.
That stuff and archival photography do not mix.
Haha… up to now I thought „The Rock“ is someone else but the Naked Photographer 😁
Great. My tip, don't procrastinate. I know, we all do it. Thanks.
Solid advice.
Very interesting content. I built a basic darkroom as a teen back in the mid 70's. One critical observation, the red on red text slides you used here just don't work...
Good stuff. I enjoy the naked photographer s content. I have zero tips.
I'd use EDTA and citric acid to remove silver that's a minor amount.
So no saving my tray then? :)
Some good tips,but I have to say red letters on a red background do not make reading easy (just a small criticism hope you don’t mind 😊)
Noted :)
I regularly filter the fixer with coffee filter, especially the fixer I use for film negatives. For paper negatives, I use the solution of 2 fixers, one to take the dirt for half of the time then the print is soaked in a much cleaner fixer. Later my clean fixer is my "dirty" fixer and I use clean and fresh chemicals in my second. @PictorialPlanet recommends this, I also found this tip in a book about darkroom techniques.
The red on red text in the video looks poor.