A few months ago it was coming up to my mum's birthday, and I wanted to give her a few photo prints of family, including her recently passed dog, Eddy. In particular I had one photo I'd taken on a Rolleiflex that I thought would make for a very nice little print, in monochrome.

I don't really use modern printers at home, because they're both expensive and infuriating. I could send the photos off to a lab, but that's a) not much effort on my part, which makes it a less interesting present, and b) I find a lot of ink-based prints fail to print true black. They're really more of a dark purple.

But hey, I buy and sell camera gear and I have a few enlargers sat around, I could just print them myself.

My history with printing

I did an A-level in photography at college, and I loved it. Looking back at my photos they are absolutely terrible, but the process. I hadn't realised quite how much I missed it. Being an awkward teenager (followed by an awkward adult) it was almost zen to spend a couple of hours in a quiet, dark room focusing on art. I hadn't thought about it in years, as things do tend to go missing from my brain, but by revisiting it now as I near 40 I've found something that was missing from my life for so long. In fact, as I went through this process of learning to print again, I started remembering parts of it that I swore I had never done, such as using contrast filters or tray development. It was like a rush of memories coming back as I smelt the developing chemicals once again.

Printing is the final step of photography. To see your photo in the real world is to know it exists. To know the time and effort you put into each individual print is rewarding in itself. I made this.

Setting up an extremely cramped darkroom

It's traditional to have your first home darkroom be in the smallest possible bathroom. It apparently even runs in my family, as my dad was telling me this was how he processed film and made prints back in our first house when I was born. Like father, like son.

Long-term I've got plans to convert part of our "shed" (more like a garage) into a darkroom, but I need to reroof the building first so that's going to be somewhat delayed. So tiny bathroom it is.

This bathroom is half-derelict after the shower fell apart due to steam softening the adhesive (a design flaw), various leaks damaging the floor, and my half-finished rewiring of the lights. A perfect first darkroom. So I grabbed my Black & Decker workmate, shoved it half into the shower, and used two volumes of manga I don't care about to prop the front legs up. The trays have to go on the toilet, floor, and small step stool, and I can only just about rotate in place, but it works. The windows I covered using art mounting board as I currently have nowhere to cut plywood, though the art board isn't dark enough so it's then covered in bin bags and gaffer tape. It's still not fully light tight but it's close enough for now.

The enlarger

I had a few enlargers lying around in the market, but I fancied trying this old 1960s Durst lab enlarger first. It has some curious features, like a twin lens setup that rotates into place (not unlike a microscope) and autofocus. It's pretty large but not awkwardly so, and I already had a couple of lenses attached to it that would work.

I did need to borrow an easel from someone else here in Cardiff, as it's oddly one of the things I was missing. An easel is very useful for getting nice tight framing on the paper, as well as consistent placement. Although the RBB easel I was lent is too large to fit horizontally on the baseboard within the confines of the shower, so it's a bit awkward in this setup.

Having used this enlarger for a month, I will be swapping it out with a different one, but I'll cover that at the end of the article.

Attempting the print

I tried out a few different negatives to get my eye back in, and some were certainly easier than others. Ilford Pan F+ is ridiculously easy to print, coming out pretty much perfect even without contrast filters. These are lovely, dense negatives with soft tones that just look incredible when printed.

But I did find an issue fairly quickly, in that a lot of my earlier negatives from when I got back into film had been developed in labs, and on the one of Eddy in particular there were a number of scratches caused by, what I presume was, the developing machines.

Learning to wet-mount a negative

Here's something I never did at college - wet-mounting a negative. There are various tricks to help reduce the impact of faults in an enlargement print, such as rubbing the side of your nose and smearing that on the shiny side of the negative. The goal being to reduce the refractivity of the scratches in the plastic base by filling them in with something. For this negative, however, the scratches were in the matt side, in the emulsion itself. So now I needed to learn a new technique.

I had a search around online and found that the dedicated fluids for this of old kinda don't exist any more, here in the UK at least, and I was running out of time to try and import something from the USA. I did order something called "Gamsol", which I think is some form of turps and which I'll be trying in the future, but at this point I was running out of time to finish this print and had to work with what I had to hand, which was lighter fluid.

Turns out this works quite well, but you do have to work swiftly. I had two glass plates to sandwich the negative between in the carrier, so I squirted lighter fluid on the bottom one and immediately placed the negative on top, added more lighter fluid on top and pressed the glass down firmly. Though lighter fluid evaporates very quickly, it sticks around for quite a while when pressed tightly between the two plates due to lack of oxygen, and once I had the technique down I was starting to get some good results.

Obviously if you do try this yourself, do keep in mind that any of these fluids are both highly flammable and probably not great to breathe in confined spaces. My eventual darkroom will have some proper ventilation.

Next steps

Anyway, I gave the finished prints to my mum for her birthday, and I've had a request for another print from someone else, so I'm working on that next.

Going forward I will obviously be working towards repairing my "shed" so I can turn that into a darkroom with some more space, but there are some changes I'll be making to my current setup for now too.

I've recently been picking up multiple job lots from a deceased estate here in Cardiff, where the original owner had an absolute tonne of darkroom gear. I've had a few other enlargers kicking about that would work well for my needs, but I had the opportunity to buy 3 monster units at once: two Durst AC 800s, and the exceptionally large Durst AC 1200, with a bleepy bloopy colour computer from the 1980s. The 800s are being sold on, and I'm keeping the 1200. It can handle both colour and black & white, and up to 4x5 negatives, so it covers pretty much everything I'll ever need to do. Do I understand how to operate it yet? Negative.

I did lose 4 critical bolts whilst moving it, which is typical, so I'm currently awaiting replacements before I swap out the old 659 in the shower setup for this. It will fit. Just.

Real Photography

I mentioned my return to the darkroom and to printing to Peter, a man in his mid-80s who sometimes visits my market stall. Peter is an old-school photographer and has shared some very interesting tips with me in the past, one of which I'll write up here at some point, and getting to speak to people who know more than me is one of the reasons I love running my market stall - people of his age and knowledge often do not exist online.

I told him about doing my first prints in 23 years, and his reply was:

"Ah, so you're finally doing real photography."