A Beginner's Guide to Darkroom Equipment

Part II

by J A Ollinger

Contents

Safelights

Timers

Trays

Misc. Printing Items

Safelights

The job of the safelight is to provide illumination without fogging (exposing) your material. Different kinds of materials are sensitive (or blind) to certain kinds of light, so it is important to get the right color.

Film is not used with safelights because they're sensitive to just about everything we can see--so if you can see it, the film will see it too. Safelights that can be used with film and color papers are usually too dim to be of much use.

B&W; papers mostly use an amber colored light. Kodak's filter for it is called OC.

Like anything, there are a variety of different kinds of safelights that run the gamut on price.

The cheapest ones I've seen are plain red bulbs. (A 15 watt bulb is sufficient -ed.) The next step up from the bare light bulbs is the kind I started with, a little Kodak Brownie that looked a lot like a tail-light from an old car. It was about the size of a peach and it screwed into a standard light socket. It put out a surprising amount of light and it worked well. It even came with two filters--one for B&W; and one for color.

A larger lamp, the kind that looks like a headlight off of a Model T, screws into a standard lightbulb socket. The nice thing about it is that one can easily get different colored filters for it.

The one thing I don?t like about the new light is that it's casts most of its light downward and I get a lot of strong shadows in inconvenient places. This was one of those problems that I did not forsee when I chose where to put the light socket.

The best safelight I?ve seen is expensive, but it's the most flexible. It's a box that hangs from the ceiling, and it has hinged flaps on the top that can be set to different opening levels. The light bounces off the ceiling, which makes for more overall illumination, and the intensity adjustment is a nice thing to have. It would be overkill for my little darkroom, but it does have its advantages.

Timers

There's an absolutely bewildering number of timers on the market. The low end ones are nothing more than regular kitchen timers where you turn the knob to the desired time and it dings when its done. The expensive ones tend to have memories for different time settings, and will handle very precise time intervals.

Timers are used twice--during the exposure of the print, and during the chemical processing of the print. Depending on your budget and how resourceful you are, there are any number of strategies for using timers in your darkroom. But for the purposes of this discussion, I'll break them down into Enlarger and Process timers.

The enlarger timer controls the light on the enlarger for the exposure of the print. You can do this by hand using the enlarger on-off switch and a stopwatch or a metronome, but if you have to dodge and burn it this can be inconvenient. Typical enlarger timers have a socket for the enlarger to plug into. You flip a ?focus? switch which turns the enlarger light on for as long as the switch is on--which allows you to compose and focus the image. When you're ready to expose, you flip the focus switch off, set the timer for the desired interval, and then press a button which will turn the enlarger light on for the desired time.

The older timers, such as the Time-o-Lite, are mechanical count-down timers. You set the timer for the desired time, push the button, and when it gets to zero it automatically resets to the desired time. It's simple but it works.

More modern and expensive timers tend to be digital and have various time settings in memory. They also have fractional settings, like tenths of seconds, which are easy to set and repeat. Some of these features look nice on paper but are pointless in use. For instance, in any exposure over 10 seconds or so, a fraction-of-a-second difference in exposure is going to be negligible, so being able to set the timer in 1/10th second increments is not going to offer much practical value.

I advise beginners on a budget to get a simple mechanical type, like a Time-o-Lite, and use the money saved on other things. Trade up to a better timer later as the features become more value.

Process timers, unless they're running some kind of film processing machine, are more straightforward and simpler. All they have to do is count down time intervals. The best ones are those that can be read and set in the dark. The fancier ones will have memories so you can preset all the times for each step and let the timer go through them.

My favorite is the venerable Gralab 300 (and its older version, the Gralab 100). It's a square block with a clock face calibrated 0-60. The face is luminous and the hands are easy to read and set in the dark. For printing I use the timer in its simplest form--I start the thing at 59:59 and let it count down to zero uninterrupted. Thus if I put my paper in the developer at 45:30, I let the hand sweep the face twice to 43:30 and pull it out at that point. I could do the same thing with a clock with a luminous sweep second hand. It saves me having to fumble with the paper and reset the timer at the same time.

Trays

There are two considerations for trays: size and features.

The size of the tray ought to be one step larger than the biggest print you will normally make. This allows a little room around the edges to get fingers or tongs onto the paper. If you put 8x10 paper into an 8x10 tray, it can be very difficult to extract it again without bending or wrinkling it.

The main special feature of a tray is contouring on the bottom of the tray. A cheap tray will have a flat bottom, and the print may get stuck to the bottom of the tray and be difficult to remove (particularly if the paper is the same size as the tray). The better trays will have some kind of contouring to keep the paper from sticking flat to the bottom of the tray. One that I saw has little ridges that are raised on one end of the tray so that it's easy to get fingers or tongs under one side of the print. Other ones I've seen have huge ridges across the bottom. The problem with huge ridges is that the print ends up sitting well off the bottom of the tray, and you have to fill the tray to a higher level to make sure the paper is covered completely.

The better trays will have some sort of easy pour spout on one of the corners, too, so that the chemistry can be poured out with less chance of slopping it all over.

Another tray I recently saw had special ridges to keep the tongs from sliding into the tray. This may or may not be useful, depending on whether this is a problem in your darkroom. My tongs have tabs and rubber boots that keep them (usually) from sliding into the soup.

Misc. Items for Printing

Photography is a hobby that's particularly prone to gimmicks and tools. Here's a short list of stuff that's commonly available:

Lintless cotton gloves. I recommend them for handling negatives. Fingerprints mar the image and the oil collects dirt.

Stirring rods. These things are used for mixing chemicals. They're useful but don't spend much on one. A big kitchen stirring spoon should do the same thing. (Just don't eat with it after you've mixed chemistry with it! -- Ed.)

Projection print scale. This is a little pie-shaped step wedge that Kodak makes. You put it on the paper and make a 60-second test exposure and then pick the step that looks like it's exposed about right. It's very useful for beginners and it's a good, low-tech tool that doesn't have to be calibrated or voltage regulated or slide-ruled to use it.

Dodging and burning tools. These things can be useful if you need them, though I've been too cheap to buy any myself. I make what I need with cardboard and a sharp knife.

Filtered funnels. I hate them, though I own one. The filter cuts the flow rate way down and it's very easy to overfill the funnel and slop chemicals all over. They're great if you have to filter a lot of crud out of the liquid. But it seems to me that if you have to filter a lot of crud out of the liquid, you've got problems that a filtered funnel won't cure.

Loupes. It's that little magnifying eyeglass that jewelers use to examine gems. They're useful for examining negatives and slides. Prices range from fairly cheap ($10 or so) to outrageous. I'd suggest starting with cheap and buy a better one if you use it a lot.

Focusing magnifier. This is kind of like a loupe, but you put it under the enlarger and examine the projected image. Also commonly known as grain magnifiers, they're used for critical focus. Like loupes, they run from cheap to outrageous. I suggest starting out with cheap and going up from there.

Paper safe. These are light-tight boxes that you can store paper in conveniently while the lights are on. They're a nice convenience but I wouldn't recommend them for beginners on a tight budget. Keep your paper in the original boxes--they're safe enough. Spend the money on other things.

Dryers. There are all kinds of ways to dry paper quickly. I have clothespins hanging over my sink and I hang the prints like laundry, but they may drip where you don't want them to. Blotter paper is absorbant paper that you either unroll or open like a book, place the prints on the paper, and then roll or close up for awhile. Some places use racks that are stackable. Some people build drying cabinets with warm air forced through. And there are machines that can take prints and dry them. Pick whichever method seems the most convenient and affordable. As above, I don't recommend expensive dryers for beginners.

If you do pick up an old dryer, be careful to make sure it takes the paper you use. I had old ferrotyping dryer, which is a polished metal drum that was heated from the inside. You'd stick the paper onto the drum (image down), let it dry, and then peal it off. If you used fiber-based paper, the ferrotyping would yeild a glossy surface. But a ferrotyping dryer will ruin resin-coated paper.

Exposure Meters. These work much like a light meter does. You place under the enlarger and it reads the light level that hits it. The idea is to program it to recognize an "exposure" that you want to reproduce. For instance, you can set it to recognize flesh tone, and theoretically you can always get that flesh tone again on subsequent prints.

I do not recommend exposure meters for beginners because it's very easy to misunderstand what they really do. All an exposure meter will do is tell you when it sees a specified quantity of light. For instance, if you set it to recognize a light level that prints as medium (neutral) gray, you can measure a spot on another negative and set everything up so that spot prints as neutral gray. It's a very useful tool to have, but it's very easy to mislead by its readings or to use it properly.