[LargeFormat] Enlargers and the New Darkroom

[Wilkes, Don MSER:EX]

> From: rstein [mailto:rstein@bigpond.net.au]

>      Thanks for the confirmation that I have not gone crazy. The great
> tungsten experiment continues apace. The filter pack is now 
> down to nothing
> but .45 yellow and I have litereally been printing all day on 
> Agfa Signum II


Dear Uncle Dick,

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm midly baffled at your amazement at
printing with an ordinary bulb and CC filters... It wasn't all that long ago
(25 years?) that this was pretty well standard operating procedure -- only
pros and *very* well-off amateurs could afford those fancy new dichroic
heads.

Printing with filters is a bit more tedious, but will give you results that
are every bit as good as those with a dichro.  They're not in the image
path, so all you're doing is mucking about with the colour of the light.
About the only realistic difference would be from using  condenser vs
diffusion, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

One long-term consideration, though, is the longevity of the filters. Heat
and light in the filter drawer will likely fade them over the course of
twenty years or so.  It won't make them *useless*, but you will have to
tweak your filter pack.  So, don't count on your filtration notes for a
particular shot to enable you to reprint years later without doing some test
strips...

I used to do colour printing back in the early '70s, but eventually gave it
up.  It was so tedious to zero in on the right colour balance, and the lack
of any way of tweaking contrast took away much of the options for being
creative.  The best I could do, most of the time, was to essentially
reproduce reality.  Well, whoopie-ding... I'd rather leave that sort of
thing to a machine, and get back to doing something more interesting, like
B&W.

But,chacun a son gout...and if one is actually making *cash* from this
endeavour, then I can see how I might even get enthusiastically behind the
endeavour :}

\donw in victoria, b.c., canada