Catching up on printing

Last night I made a few small prints from the negatives I developed the day before, and managed to get eight small prints that I am fairly happy with.

The whole process took around three hours, including setup, measuring out chemicals, making a contact sheet, tweaking exposure times, printing, checking, printing some more, packup, washing, and putting away. Such is the balance when I have a temporary darkroom setup that lives in one side of a wardrobe in my bedroom.

These are a few mobile phone snaps of the printing process; the top two shots are prints sitting in the ‘wash’ tray, fresh from the fixer tray and ready to be washed, and the bottom picture is a sneak peek at a couple of prints that I thought paired up nicely.

I feel like I’m getting faster and more comfortable with printing at home, which hopefully will mean I’ll be doing a bit more of it. I’ve never really been super happy with how my prints have turned out, but my thoughts on that may have changed after spending a bit of time looking at the beautifully smooth tones I got in the shot of people walking out of Etihad Stadium in the top picture above. The gradients in that shot are smooooooooth.

The thing that I’ve found really satisfying about the whole process in making these prints is that they haven’t touched a computer at all, from the point of capture of the image right through to the print. I spend eight hours a day sitting in front of a computer in my day job and consequently spending another couple of hours at home scanning and dust spotting images is wayyyyyy down on my priority list at the moment.

I’ll post some scans of the prints when I get a chance. Thanks for reading, reader.