So, again I went into darkroom to make new prints from my darkroom.As you know, after lessons at Adrian’s workshop I’ve learned a lot of new useful ‘tricks’ which helps with obtaining good results. Of course, most important is rather this what is on the picture and not the print itself but I think I have this what’s interesting to me so I’m in good place! It is hard to scan on home scanner prints with good enough quality to show you how those look like in reality but even though, if you’re slightly more experienced than new-comer into darkroom world, you’ll catch what I’m talking about. I have definitely improved my skills I think. Some of my new prints I’m trying to ‘modify’ by burning particular areas to obtain specific effect. Not always it is easy and I can’t say I’ve managed to obtain this what I needed. In this occasion I tried to simulate that old boat/ship is emerging from the DARKNESS, but this what I’m getting isn’t quite this what I need. See below…. I like the colour of Ilford Galerie paper and its contrast. I have learned from Adrian that having good quality water, […]
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Darkroom workshop with Adrian Ensor Recently my girlfriend announced me that for my birthday gift she prepared something special! Of course it didn’t take me long to pull out what’s that from her 🙂 It turned out it was a workshop with one of the greatest darkroom printers and also great photographers, I mean with Adrian Ensor here in London! You can image how happy I was. I’ve been waiting long two weeks for that day. I knew I had just 8hrs to learn as much as I can during this time. Obviously I need to prepare questions to outstanding things which no one else was able to give an answer. I thought to myself that it is great occasion to learn lots of things which I’ve never been good with. My list consisted: Better dogging and burning How to better control contrast Flattening the final prints And all other small details which by observation I can learn Finally that day came! We’ve arrived at agreed 10AM on Saturday 4th of August. Adrian has been waiting for us already. We drank a cup of coffee and we’ve been talking about the plan for a day, ideas and of course we were […]
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How to print in a darkroom This I’ll learn from my friend Roy, who is a darkroom printer from London. Working with Roy, I can learn tons of things which I wouldn’t be able to learn from books, conversations with other amateurs, internet articles or blogs. This is amazing to me and also it is great addition to our friendship! We’ll be working together on materials which I hope we will be able to produce to the highest level. Where sparkling highlights will be signing and shadows will be warm and full of details. Last Saturday we’ve been printing for our first client – Janie who brought her old and never printed negative film. This film has been sitting in a drawer for around 50 years. On that day it has been for the first time, put into Roy’s De Vere 705s enlarger. As a matter of learning we’ve been learning how to properly get good contrast keeping details in shadows and clean fully detailed highlights. Roy showed me how to properly dodge the print. I think I need to exercise on this as my dodging is really poor… I’ve never been good on that so I always wanted to avoid […]
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