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You might get lucky with them but I would not trust them. You can do the Kodak safelight test to see if they are safe pretty easily. Do not do the coin test, it doesn't really work because it only tests paper pre-exposure. Basically cut a mask for a sheet of your paper and expose a strip around 1 inch wide (you want the paper to develop to a light grey). Move the paper to the brightest part of your darkroom and expose it to your safelight in stages of 1 minute, 2 minutes then 4 minutes. Then mask off the other side of the test strip and expose that to the same time in your enlarger. This'll show you how your safelight performs pre and post exposure and how much working time you have under your safelight until it is unsafe.  
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Oct 6, 2023 02:16
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 12:30 |
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a dingus posted:I just bought what seems like almost an entire dark room off Craigslist for $50. The only thing I'm missing is chemicals. It's been almost 20 years since I've used an enlarger or made prints. Nice! The 6x9 enlargers seem fairly common here, 4x5 is a bit harder to come by. I’ve found that the random red LED strips that are 100% fine for wet plate do fog paper, I’d err on the side of a proper safelight. I wouldn’t worry about the lens too much. As far as a darkroom, the Ilford tent is p decent and B&H may still be running their special on it.
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Oct 6, 2023 07:06
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Speaking of fogging paper, today I answered the question of whether a random red safelight (a 4x5 contact printer that came with my darkroom setup) was compatible with Kodak OC (amber) - nope!  For fellow apartment dwellers, I can definitely recommend the Ilford Pop-Up Darktent I mentioned in my last post. This is actually my first time using it for its intended purpose (wet printing with an enlarger, I mainly use it for wet plate collodion), it has a reasonably small footprint and isn't too bad to put up. You'll want a 4' folding table for setting things up on.   If you have the room to leave something up permanently, a hydroponic grow tent will give you more space and be cheaper, but the Ilford tent is lot nicer to set up/break down.
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Jan 16, 2024 00:13
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Welp, I bought two 4x5 enlargers this weekend. I've been trawling Marketplace for a reasonably priced one with enough relevant accessories (lenses and neg carriers for the formats I shoot) for ages, and finally found one about an hour and a half away from me. It was a bit more enlarger than I wanted as an apartment dweller, but the price was right, so I decided to go for it. I wound up having to break it down into three pieces to get it into the back of my Prius with the seats down, and it was still a very tight fit. I reassembled it this arvo without the castors but it's still like 190cm tall. It's got a lot of cool features: motorised column, dimmable lamp (if you want to more dodging and burning), easily tilts 90 degrees for big enlargements on the wall, etc. I'd swear there was a 150mm lens on it for 4x5 in the pictures, but they couldn't find it when I turned up. There were enough ancillary freebies that I didn't mind, these aren't necessarily the most valuable, but I thought they were interesting:  I have like 3 of these things now, also useful for wet plate (knocking dust off the plate before doing collodion pour). I googled it and the polonium has long since decayed.  This is a clever idea I'm surprised I haven't come across before. I wish it had a flat internal bottom to be a little more economical with chemistry (would like to use it with wet plate) but still should be handy for prints.  The Beast (with other two parts enlargers next to it). Don't @ me about the flag Megabound: it was free, and helps Australianise my sanctuary (nobody but me and the cat use this room) while I am in exile. The next day I decided to hit up a local camera collector swap meet hoping to find a 135 or 150mm enlarging lens. The only one I could find was attached to a battered Omega D2 sans baseboard. The seller was keen not to have to load it all back in his car, so he said I could have the lot (blackout curtains, cold light head, condensers, column, lens) for fifty bucks... and there was a dumpster at the back of the car park, he wouldn't judge. The cold light head definitely interested me, so I brought the lot home. I am kinda torn as the MCRX is luxurious and cool, but even without the wooden stand it's too big to fit through the door into my bathroom (and takes up an unreasonable amount of the limited space in the Ilford tent). If I want to use it, I'll have to black out the big window in the spare bedroom its in now, which will be a PITA to do every time I want to print since I rent and can't sink anything into the walls. OTOH the D2 feels like a rickity piece of poo poo by comparison and has no neg carriers, although I do have a 3D printer. I've already pulled the Beseler 67 I was using before off its baseboard to drill some new holes and see how the D2 sits on it. Maybe I keep both...? In addition to the 6x7 and 4x5 holders, the MCRX also came with a Beseler Negatrans for 35mm (I also see one in a dingus's post!). It's pretty neat; you load a strip of 35mm negs in one end and can use the little knob to precisely feed it in and get it into position, scroll to the next one, etc. By no means a necessity but a nice little quality of life thing I wasn't expecting. I was also pretty stoked to nab a Fuji FBD-12 for $30 that was hiding in a corner, something I've been low key keeping an eye out for since I found out it existed a few years ago. I reckon there's enough headroom that I can probably load and develop 8x10 wet plates with my vertical tank, which will be a lot more portable than my current setup.  
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May 20, 2024 02:36
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Great finds, that Beseler is gorgeous. I have a D2 in my darkroom and I love it, except mine has a black and white condenser head and I prefer that to the cold cathode. One of the best things about them is availability of spare parts so if you really wanted to keep it then things like negative carriers should be pretty easy to get for it, I got NOS springs for mine after one of mine gave up the ghost.
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May 20, 2024 02:45
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Megabound posted:Great finds, that Beseler is gorgeous. I have a D2 in my darkroom and I love it, except mine has a black and white condenser head and I prefer that to the cold cathode. One of the best things about them is availability of spare parts so if you really wanted to keep it then things like negative carriers should be pretty easy to get for it, I got NOS springs for mine after one of mine gave up the ghost. I'd heard of speed boosters for lenses but I didn't know you could get NOS for enlargers
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May 20, 2024 04:47
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Spent about half of the long weekend in the darkroom printing shots from my trip to Hawaii last month (only about halfway through the roll): This plastic blackout material I got on Amazon is prone to pinholes, you can kinda see some here even with the lights on. OTOH I rent and it's light enough to be held up with pushpins and painter's tape, so who's to say whether it's good or bad?  A second, larger sheet held on with just pushpins blocks anything that comes through the pinholes or around the sides. It's always way easier to halfarse two layers of lightproofing than try to get one perfect.  My enlarger has both a giant filter drawer just below the lamp (I think for doing colour?) and a small one that takes square plastic ones just in front of the lens. It did come with the full set of plastic filters, but I'm semi-used to my Ilford multigrade filters already so I improvised a below-lens holder with some cardboard and gaff tape. I'm planning to model and 3d print my own filter holder + frames for the Ilford gels to make handling them nicer. (I meant to set up the tripod and take some photos of everything in action but kept forgetting, so you'll have to use your imagination. I just used a 4' folding table on my left to hold my 3 8x10 trays plus an 11x14 at the end for laying out test strips/prints), and a chair on my right for the paper safe. The 11x14 trays have proven to be really useful to have even though I haven't tried an actual 11x14 print yet.  Early efforts at split grade. I've done it successfully (more or less) in the past but eventually decided to just stick to the 2.5 filter for now.  My initial test strip was kind of hard to read but I knew it was somewhere between 20s, so I started with a 20s base exposure then did little 2s exposures to try and dial it in exactly. In hindsight, this was kinda dumb. I hadn't noticed the little tree branch in the upper left on the negative, but it was easy enough to dodge out in the final print.  This one is probably too contrasty. The Lomo LC-A lens can be really sharp in the center but the corners... often leave much to be desired. I might see if I can burn in the bottom in a later version to try and draw attention away from it. Then again, it's probably something only I'll notice.  Don't think there's any detail to be had in this sky, but I still may try and reprint this one too. The super dark test strip is from where I forgot to stop down the lens. I made all kind of simple mistakes throughout the weekend through either forgetfulness or clumsiness, feels like learning wet plate all over again (in a good way).  Prints so far  Found this dish drying rack in the alley yesterday, realised it'd work great for drying trays. Anyways, it was really enjoyable and I'm definitely looking forward to printing/learning more! I went back to visit my parents recently and grabbed all my old negs from 20-10 years ago, so looking forward to printing some of my old stuff too.
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May 28, 2024 15:14
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