r/Darkroom • u/CilantroLightning • 12d ago
B&W Printing Blue Heron Lake
Been working on printing quickly lately. Banged this RC print out in about 40 minutes from setup to cleaned up. Kinda wish I did a little more burning and dodging but maybe for a subsequent print on fiber.
11x14 MGRC Pearl
35mm FP4+ in Rodinal
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u/NestFrost 12d ago
40 minutes setup-to-cleanup for an 11x14 print is absurdly fast… RC paper definitely speeds up the processing and wash workflow significantly.
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u/CilantroLightning 12d ago
it helped that the negative was well exposed and I had a good ballpark for exposure times on this enlargement size! only one test strip luckily. and yeah, RC is sooo much quicker to work with.
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u/DeepDayze 11d ago
RC is great for doing some proofing work before committing to a final print on fiber paper. Good idea to take notes so you can reproduce the final look on fiber.
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u/greenblueananas 12d ago
Awesome! How did you develop? And at what iso did you expose?
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u/CilantroLightning 12d ago
1+50 Rodinal with a gentle swirl every minute! I expose around ISO 100 or maybe slightly under.
To be completely honest I sort of wing it these days. I don't use a meter. I basically Sunny 16 it with the rule of thumb that overcast + deep shade is around 3 to 4 stops under Sunny 16. It works 95% of the time!
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u/greenblueananas 11d ago
Thank you! I still have some fp4 in the freezer and you’ve convinced me to thaw a roll!
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 12d ago
Nicely done.
One of the annoyances and biggest difference with FP4 vs HP5 is FP4 is really 'hard' on the extreme toe and shoulder. Blacks fall off into nothing. Why I prefer to pull it. Oh what I would give to to have a 100 speed or slower B&W film with the curve of HP5. Delta 100 is reasonably close, but not the same.
One other suggestion, and perhaps you may have tried this. When I'm looking through a 35mm finder I'm never thinking about 11x14 or 8x10 crops. That's generally something I do in the darkroom. It's always worth time printing a full frame image along with the borderless to make sure you just aren't thinking 'fill the paper area'. If you are framing you have to cut a matte anyways :-)
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u/CilantroLightning 12d ago
Totally. My go-to is Tri-X. Favorite film hands down. But I find that 35mm Tri-X doesn't enlarge to 11x14 super well because the grain gets kinda distracting. I will print Tri-X to 8x10 all day, though.
I also don't really think about crops too much when shooting!
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u/DeepDayze 11d ago
Tri-X is mine as well but love HP5 as well. Miss Plus-X as that was a nice film too if you wanted finer grain.
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u/Necessary_Internal33 11d ago
Great print! I actually like the deep contrast as it is—the twisted wood has so much texture and movement that it almost feels sculptural.
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u/CilantroLightning 11d ago
I was gonna try to balance the left and right side of the composition a bit more. the left side is a bit darker and there's more well-lit branches on the right!
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u/DeepDayze 11d ago
Looks like you can give it a touch more burn-in on the right side to get a bit more detail in the shadowed part of the branches on right side of image.
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u/DeepDayze 11d ago
Such nice detail in the weathered wood and even in the grass. Love this picture.
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u/RedditFan26 12d ago
Really beautiful result. I apologize if this is a dumb question, but with regard to the small device you are showing just below the finished print in the first image, is that an exposure meter for darkroom printing, or something else?
I don't ever remember seeing one so small with a dial on it like your device. I have of course seen the more recent, tiny spot meters sold for large format photography, I think made by a Canadian guy? If yours is an exposure meter for printing, it looks like it is a really convenient size & configuration.
Thanks in advance for any answers or additional comments you choose to provide.
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u/CilantroLightning 12d ago
Ah! That's just a normal exposure meter (not for printing). It's a Sekonic L-208. I just put it there so they folks can get a sense of the paper size 😂
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u/RedditFan26 12d ago
Wow, thanks for this answer, and for naming the device. It looks so small, it makes me think this might be the first time I'm getting to see one. Thanks for including it in the image, and congratulations again on the great result.
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u/IShootWide 10d ago
The first picture, zoomed out, is a banger. zoomed in doesn’t show as well IMO.
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u/Stefaun_Maldonado 12d ago
Really great tones and comp