Adventures in Darkroom Printing

[Barney]

In lieu of getting into a darkroom soon, I have started researching the process, and what better place to ask my stupid questions than here, amongst friends.

I have ended up at a technique that goes by the name of "F Stop Printing" and is supposedly so simple that it is a recommend practice in schools and colleges !

I am barking up the wrong tree or is it worthwhile considering this particular technique of the printing process more thoroughly.

Other avenues of investigation or recommendations gratefully received.

 

[lindsay]

I had to look that up. It seems to be what I've done in the past, more or less, with reasonable;e results. There are folk on here with shed loads of expert darkroom time though, so best wait for those replies

 

[Kevin Allan]

F stop printing makes a lot of sense but I'm not sure it's necessarily easier than any other method, except when you want to change your print size.

Supposing you have printed a landscape image at 7 inches by 5 inches and you had established that an exposure of eight seconds produced satisfactory tones in most of the foreground but the sky needed to be darkened with another eight seconds. Also there is a dark rock in the foreground which needs to be dodged for two seconds to lift the shadows.

You can think of these exposure elements in terms of f stops, just like the f stops which affect exposure in camera. An increase of 1 f stop requires doubling the exposure, so we can say that the sky requires 1 stop more exposure than the foreground. The dodging of the rock for two seconds is a 1/4 stop reduction.

When you then try to increase the print size to 8*10 you need to recalculate the base exposure AND the times for dodging and burning.

There is a formula for calculating a new base time for a larger print. Once you know this, you can easily calculate the time for burning the sky and dodging the rock, which will still be double the new base time for the sky and 1/4 less for the rock.

I used to have an expensive RH Designs Analyser Pro which allows the user to calculate base and additional times and used f stop printing. Apart from the fact that I ruined it by exposing it to humidity, I found that the reality didn't quite live up to the promise. My darkroom printing improved when I returned to embracing test strips.

However you can use a table to calculate the f stops without using an expensive tool.

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Just a thought: Paterson enlarging meters seem to be going for £10 to £20 pounds at the moment on Ebay or similar sites. For a beginner in the darkroom, that might be a good investment, given the price of paper these days.