This is the “dry” side of the darkroom:

That’s a used Saunders/LPL C6600 condenser enlarger on my coffee table that I move into the bathroom. It’s a pretty decent beginner to novice enlarger and does the trick for me. When I enlarge 6x6 negatives — which is about 99% of the time — I use a Meopta Anaret S 80mm lens. It’s pretty decent too. On the rare occasion I enlarge a 35mm negative I use an LPL 50mm lens that I think came with the enlarger. I also have a nice set of Ilford multigrade filters that go inside the head of the enlarger. They control contrast on multigrade paper. On the baseboard of the enlarger is my nice four-blade Saunders easel. It makes making nice crisp edges a snap.

To the right of the enlarger is a used Gralab 505 digital timer. Both the enlarger and red safelight (on the floor, outside the frame here) are plugged into the timer. There is also a foot switch to control it. The timer is toggled so that when the enlarger is off, the safelight is on and vice-versa. It handles time in tenths of a second. Having a digital timer really makes print making go a lot smoother.

To the left of the enlarger is a stack of different sized paper in their boxes. I mostly use resin coated (RC) paper as it’s just so much more convenient for my process. I do have a few packets of fibre-based paper, but I don’t use it too often. I also put the little dust blower and anti-static cloth on the top. I also have a few stiff pieces of paper and cardboard for making test strips with. There is also a few pieces with holes cut in them in case I need or want to burn and dodge.

Once a piece of paper is exposed, it needs to be run through a few chemical baths. This is the “wet” side of the darkroom, but it’s only really half:

The red tray is developer. In this case — and almost always — it is Kodak Dektol diluted 1+2. Dektol is a good, all-purpose neutral to cold-tone developer that develops an image in two minutes. That’s what I use anyway. It’s cheap to buy and easy to mix. The gray tray placed on the toilet is the stop bath, where the print goes after the developer. Stop bath is needed to instantly stop the development process. It gives a slightly higher level of consistency from print to print and helps to extend the life of the fixer. After 30 seconds in the stop bath, the print goes into the fixer. The fixer is in the white tray on the vanity. I use Ilford Rapid Fixer as it does its job in 30 seconds, is easy to find and mix.

After the print comes out of the fixer, it’s safe to turn the lights on. I take the print into the kitchen and wash it for a few minutes in the steel sink. After that, I put it through a 1+20 selenium toner bath for four minutes. You have to be very careful with this as selenium isn’t the most healthy thing to be subjected to. I use gloves and ventilation. I should also probably be wearing safety goggles, but like I said I am crazy careful with all of this stuff. After the toner, the print gets washed again, then hung to dry. In case you’re wondering, I tone in selenium not for a change in colour — which it does at lower dilutions — I do it because it tends to create nice deep blacks and selenium is a more stable metal than silver, so it’ll last longer. Some say it’ll last a couple of hundred years in decent conditions.

And there it is, a print (of this) hanging to dry. The test strip is on the right. From that I determined the final print exposure to be twelve seconds at f11. White whites, black blacks and a full range of midtones in between. It really makes printmaking a whole lot easier when the in-camera exposure is spot on. It pays to take your time when exposing the film correctly in-camera. A properly exposed negative can be made into a beautiful, rich print with as little darkroom work as possible. And when you have a small, temporary darkroom like mine, that’s a huge plus.

It’s amazing to think that prints made in my little bathroom are hung on walls from coast to coast.

I’m of the opinion that the bag — any kind of bag — is the utmost expression of practicality. Like any tool, the correct bag for the correct job makes life easier. When it comes to camera bags it often means the difference between having your camera with you all the time, and having it rarely to never. When you enjoy taking photos not having a camera with you sort of defeats the purpose, right? The difficulty comes when try to match the bag to the situation. Unless you make your own or modify a bag yourself, it can be difficult to find a camera bag that does everything you need it to, which is something I’ve been struggling with lately.

Unlike most people, I walk everywhere. Not out of economic necessity thankfully, but because I genuinely love to walk in my community. I can’t think of an easier or more healthy way of getting to know your neighbourhood. On top of that, I’m lucky enough to live all of 800 metres from my office. So when you walk as much as I do, the bag that carries your life within its walls must be pretty special. For the past year I’ve had two seperate bags to take care of it all. When I’m not on-call at work and don’t need to bring my laptop home with me it’s been the 7-million Dollar Home from Crumpler. When I’m on-call it’s my wicked MEC Brenta courier bag that is almost voluminous enough to live in. Problem is, during those weeks I’m on-call and carrying my messenger bag I’m not carrying my camera. I’ve decided that’s not acceptable anymore and thought there had to be bag that would do it all for me. I was right.

I went looking online for a good quality bag that would hold my medium format gear, a large laptop, some personal effects like a small thermos, a book and other small items, would be good in the weather we get here in Halifax — it gets a little windy and rainy — and be at least somewhat cost-effective. There are a lot of camera bags for sale these days. Everything from the smallest sleeves and pouches all the way up to massive tent-sized bags I’m fairly certain you could go around the world with. After a couple of hours of browsing, comparing specs and prices, reading reviews — are there any meaningful reviews online? — I came across a bag that looked like it would work: the National Geographic Earth Explorer 2477, a large shoulder bag.

After it arrived I went to work packing it up with my usual supply of stuff. Camera with lens, extra lens, meter, filter case and all the little things that seem to go along with taking pictures. Lots of space left. Added book, thermos, cap, sunglasses case, still lots of space left, including the sleeve where the laptop fits. All loaded up it closes easily and securely with a nice zippered flap inside the top flap to keep dust and weather out. On the outside there are three more large pockets, two on the front and one large, document-sized on the back side. Even when fully loaded it’s a comfortable bag to carry with a large strap that’s easily adjustable and well-made handle on top. The exterior fabric is a nice rough but not too rough cotton-hemp blend that so far stands up to the small amount of abuse I’ve subjected it to.

Overall, I’m very pleased with my new bag. More of a do-it-all commuter bag than a pure camera bag, but that’s exactly what I was looking for. So, I’m up to seven camera bags now, hopefully this one will be the last for a while! If I feel up to it I may take a quick snap of it all, just to show off a little.

Update

August 6th, 2010

After many months of daily use, I’ve reached a few conclusions about this bag. First, while it carries a gret deal, the shoulder strap becomes unusable fairly quickly. It’s not a real over-the-shoulder bag, it looks like it was designed to hang off one shoulder, not across your chest. This is a major failure to me. The more weight I added to the bag, the worse the strap became, with the adjustment buckles easily slipping under the pressure. In a ten minute walk to work, the buckles would slip two inches down the strap causing me to readjust it every time I used it. That alone made me put the bag in the closet.

The other problem I had was with its lack of weather resistance. One morning on my walk to work it was raining very hard, with wind. My MEC Brenta Courier bag laughs in the face of rain and wind, while this bag seemed to cower at the sight. The material used on the inside looks and feels like it would do a decent job keeping out the rain, but it doesn’t. In just a few minutes in that rain a notebook stored inside had been ruined. This along with the unfriendly strap put me over the edge with this bag. I’ve taken the removable camera padding out and put them in my MEC Brenta, turning it into a custom messenger/camera bag. One with a comfortable strap and great weather resistance.

After living in northern BC for ten years I had pretty much given up hope of ever seeing them live again. It wasn’t going to happen up there. But then I moved to a much larger city on the east coast, with more access to live music, and the faint glimmer of hope became a little brighter. Well, the live music gods have obviously decided to reward me and others like me here with a two-night acoustic duo performance by Andy and Josh. Oh happy days!

Not only did I get to see and hear them play, I also got over my fear of making an ass of myself and actually said hello. I gushed a tiny little bit when I thanked them for making their way out here, but I think Andy has seen that before, he was very gracious. A few songs into their set I thought I’d put the video capabilites of my fancy iPhone to the test and record a song. Turned out not too bad.

From City of Sirens, here’s a live acoustic performance of Hello Beautiful Life:

Thanks again to Andy and Josh for bringing their guitar, trumpet, voices and microphones out here and showing me that even after all this time you haven’t missed a beat. Come back soon!