The sun is low in a Kodachrome sky, the fields are shorn like a new Marine recruit and what trees there are are devoid of leaves. It hasn’t rained for a month or so and the trucks hauling grain to the massive terminals leave clouds of dust in their wake obscuring the horizon in a haze.
So why the heck am I out there searching for something, anything to photograph? Taking a Black & Darkroom course at the Alberta University of the Arts or AUArts, that’s why. The other projects are on hiatus for the time being.
Oh, there are the cliched landscapes, you know, abandoned grain elevators standing on the horizon waiting for grain trucks that never come; these trucks now go to the large inland terminals owned by Viterra amongst others. There’s the abandoned main street which I suppose I could work into one of my projects or the hotel that eager new Canadians bought only to have their dreams dashed by COVID. I have to ask myself do these qualify as a landscape? Street photography? I suppose they'll have to.
Our instructor has been dealt a bad hand by AUA. Three of the nine enlargers are INOP for various reasons and another one is kinda cranky. There’s only room for two in the film loading closet and only room for two in the film developing areas. We have 6 in the course, but if we had the full complement of eight, it would be quite cosy. RaeAnn brought her own changing bag for people to use but by the second class everyone brought their own.
I arrive early to load my developing tank in a quiet room before the off so I can start the development process. Graduated cylinders are in the main darkroom and if people are printing it’s hard to find one and then find the sink and wash it. Films loaded and developed, it’s time to wash. The only running water for the rinse is in the darkroom proper so you have to fumble around getting to the water source, fumble around to make sure the hose is connected to the film washer und so weiter. Put the film back into the tank, fill it with water because the Photoflo is in the film development area. Now the sink in that area is connected to a large garbage can because that’s where the used developer goes for silver recovery. You dump the last rinse water in there and pray that the tech has emptied it out. The other night it was close. Wipe the film with your own squeegee – the one in the lab is pretty crusty too – and then finally into the film drying cupboard. Will I put the dried film on the light table? the one with the tape, ink, and scratches that make it look like it went through a knife fight? Nope. I roll it up and put it into a film canister for me to cut at home.
Printing has similar bottle necks. 6 enlargers? Just enough for the class. Negative carriers? 3 and one that is only barely compatible with one of the LPL enlargers. Sigh.
Print processing has a queue. The engineers among us have figured out that with two fixing trays and staggering the start of development we can fix two images in two trays. There’s not enough room for more trays so we’re restricted to one developer, one stop,and two fix and a large tray for the wash. There is a larger sink for the archival wash. Once done, it’s to the print drier Robin! Rinse, repeat.
Several people have bought their own film developing kits and good for them; the AUArts tanks are not in good nick, some of the reels are coated in some black substance and all the bits and pieces are scattered in various bins high above the reach of a lot of people.
I can understand buying their own kits. The chemicals (1+1) D76, stop bath and fixer of unknown ancestry and age make one suspicious. I test the fixer every time and even though it has the look of a sickly geriatric’s urine and dribbles out of the tank like someone with a prostate problem it still passes muster.
It appears that the tech who’s responsible for the lab isn’t around judging by the chaos in the darkroom. After class we clean up and take the (hopefully) washed developing tanks and trays that have been left behind by persons unknown back to their proper resting places.
I am enjoying the course immensely and it is nice to get reacquainted with darkroom processes and getting those chops back but with the bottlenecks caused by more students than enlargers that are serviceable, I decide just to make contact sheets and let people who are new to the darkroom have a go.
I also have to give RaeAnn the instructor kudos. She was set up to fail by AUArts with a totally crap working environment. No support from the (nonexistent) darkroom tech and equipment that appeared to be unmaintained and creaky. She faced every challenge with equanimity and fixed film drying cabinets, print driers, busted timers, and wrong enlarger lenses on the fly. Thank you RaeAnn.
I just take the film home and cut it into strips to run through the Nikon LS-5 scanner that I scored for 50 bucks at clearance sale at a local camera store. This results in more dicking about. The Nikon software (and the scanner for that matter) are no longer supported. I started with Vuescan,older versions of which worked swimmingly with the LS-5. Latest version? No such luck. It couldn’t find the interframe borders. Oh, sure you could set it by pfaffing about with offsets etc, for every single roll frame. I also didn’t like the scan quality. I tried using my VS750 flatbed but again no detection of frame boundaries and mediocre scan quality.
After consulting The HiveMind I find that there’s a video of howyadoit. It involves some jiggery-pokery with drivers but once that is done, everything works as advertised. Excellent scans, with the option to save .NEF which NegativeLabPro can work with. I scan the BW to to positive TIFF and then work it in Lightroom and NIK SilverFX.
Results up soon…
