Developing and printing


Printing Technique
 
A convenient size of paper when starting out is 5"x7"

Set your enlarging lens aperture initially to f8, and make adjustments with your exposure times.
 
Place the negative into the film carrier, and switch the enlarger on to focus the image, and to crop, if necessary. Open the lens aperture to see clearly. After focussing, remember to close it down to f8 or f11 or whatever the suitable setting is. Turn off the light.
When ready, cut a piece of photo paper into three strips so you can make several exposure test strips.
 
With the enlarger light still off, place the test strip onto the paper holder under the lens in an image area where the tones are fairly consistent, and hold a piece of cardboard above it to shadow your test strip. Make three exposures, of 3 secs each, progressively over the test strip.
Develop (2 minutes minimum), rinse, fix and wash this test strip.
You should have three 'blocks' of distinct exposures on the strip 3, 6, 9 seconds.
From these, you can ascertain a correct exposure. If necessary, use another strip to test your chosen exposure in a 'difficult' part of the image. Change it to 2, 4, etc seconds if it's too dark, longer if too light, or open up the lens one stop (eg: f8 to f5.6).
 
Note that all the prints you make must be developed for the same time as your test strip, to achieve accurate results.
Again, its most useful if you standardise on a consistent development time for all your prints (say, 2 minutes), and keep the developer temperature 18°C - 20°C.
Then, at least you have these variables constant, and all you need to do is find a correct exposure.
 
Agitation in the developer bath should be constant (gentle rocking) until the image is visible, then intermittent agitation. If you don't agitate the print, it lacks contrast, and if you agitate all the time, it increases contrast. Sometimes this increased contrast is required to sharpen a print. Nowadays it is difficult to buy the old graded paper (different degrees of contrast) so you use multigraded paper with small colour filters inside the enlarger head to change contrast. This ability to change the contrast of the printed image make the difference between a dull image and a great print that jumps off the paper. These filters are cheap, and come with clear instructions.
 
The print is only placed briefly into the stop bath to halt further developing action, and stays in the fixer for several minutes (depending on fixer freshness) to make permanent the development process. Regular intermittent agitation is required.
 
Wash your print, don't leave it to soak, water must constantly flow over it.
 
If areas of your print are too dark or too light, but the image overall is at the correct density, 'burning' and 'dodging' are techniques that you use to darken or lighten parts of the image, by concentrating or reducing the light from the illuminated negative onto the print. For this you can use your hands, fingers, or pieces of shaped/torn black paper attached to thin, black wire. Florists' wire is perfect.
In this situation, you may need to increase the exposure time, by 'stopping down' the lens to f16 - f22. This results in less light falling onto the paper, so that a longer exposure time is required, giving more time to manually direct the light etc onto the image.

If, for example, you wish to show detail inside a doorway, while the outside wall is bathed in sunlight, you would expose the print twice.. first to expose the doorway very briefly, then hold a piece of cardboard to throw a shadow over the doorway, thereby shading this area, as when you inspect the negative you will see the doorway is very thin, letting maximum light through; whereas the bright wall is dense on the negative, requiring much longer exposure. Separate test-strips will reveal the different exposure times needed for the two areas. Remember to allow for the first exposure time already given, when calculating the second 'dodge' exposure time.

and, details about taking pictures with a Pinhole Camera here