Making progress with my new darkroom!
While doing much research & making the many decisions about how to do this I decided to stage it – first I will get my cyanotype and alt print setup working:
So I’m using a powerful UV Grow light, which is suspended over the trays… And I just place a large old canvas frame across them while making exposures, using the contact printing frame or directly
I already had a stainless steel tray which is big enough to hold three large trays – dev, stop, fix… And after much searching I found an old shower tray with the drain outlet to the side (easier to fit & evcentually have plumbed in). There isn’t any existing water or drain to the dark room, but there is to the room next door to it – my foley room. So for now I will do washes in there…
When I bought the DeVere 507 enlarger the price reflected that it had a faulty Dichroic (colour) head. The previous owner said the EPROM needed replacement and they were not available any more. So it did still boot up and I could switch the lamps on but… it was noisy AF with two big fans running constantly to cool the two 250W bulbs, and the colour mixing/filters did not work – the EPROM remote controls them, so you would select eg Magenta, type a number and the correct amount of filtration would be moved in front of the bulbs. While messing around with it, I almost got it going – I could actually make the filters activate etc… But it was unreliable – one day it would work & the next not & it had no memory. Fully working they are a great idea as you can even calibrate them for a batch of paper & store the settings. So I knew I needed to replace the light source.
My plan all along was to replace the Dichroic head with an LED head, and there are a bunch of projects with full build details online showing how people have successfully done this in the past.
Also at one stage, a UK camera company Intrepid, made & released an LED head for the DeVere 504 enlarger as apparently thats what they had in their own dark room. There is an install guide on their site but for some reason they don’t still sell that particular setup anymore, and instead developed their own fully self contained compact enlarger using an LED head.
OK So I ordered in parts – 15 LEDs and an LED driver powerful enough to drive that many LEDs, all from LED Supply and an aluminium block to act as a heatsink, ordered online via Little Metal who were excellent to deal with. I’ve also replaced the two noisy fans in thee Dichroic Head with one very quiet 12V fan.
So as a project, rather than have to design and build an entire new enclosure for the LED head, I am adapting the Dichroic head light mixing box to house the LED panel and driver, so the only visible change is a power cable for the LEDs.
The other benefit is that the head remains a similar weight to the original. This avoids the issue of the weight balanced spring mechanism suddenly wanting to go through the ceiling once the weight of the head is removed or significantly changed…
This version I am only using white LEDs as I do not plan to print colour at all, it doesn’t interest me. But all of the pro LED heads use RGB LEDs and provide control to set levels for them, so as to calibrate for colour but also because blue & green can be used to alter contrast when printing B&W. So while I won’t be able to do that via control of LEDs, I can still use such technique by using filters on the enlargers lens. I’ll see how that goes, and have seen plenty of great prints online using this technique but I can also imagine building v2 of this LED head, with RGB LEDs.
To control the timing of exposures with the LED head, I luckily bought a dark room of gear ages ago and amongst all the gear was an excellent timer – the StopClock LE by RH Designs, who still exist and I found a PDF manual for my timer on their site here
This entire project has been an excellent and endless learning experience. And using this timer is just one example as I had never heard of F Stop printing before. Usually prior to making a print, you would make a test strip print, where you expose say for 5 seconds, then cover a section, expose for another 5 seconds, then repeat.. You would then develop the test strip, check the exposure and say somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds looked good, you’d do another test strip to narrow down the target best exposure.
But density of light is not linear, so making a test strip going 5,10,15,20seconds is not the best way – you should do 5,10,20,40 ie an exponential increase. And not-coincidentally, the same exponential increase we make when changing F Stops on a lens, for the same reason.
So this timer lets you change modes between linear time and F Stop/exponential time! It enables you to switch on the LED head to focus, and to make a timed exposure once the photo paper is in place. And it also controls the safe lights. It also has handy functions such a foot trigger eg if doing repeated exposures to dodge & burn parts of the print.
Anyway, all is great progress! And as with such projects, at times it feels like no progress is being made at all and then lots of progress occurrs all at once!
My plan has been to slowly escalate the types of prints.
So first of all is getting my cyanotype print setup calibrated & working:
UV exposure > wash > tone > wash
Then maybe I’ll make some lumen prints: UV exposure photograms > fix > wash
Then using the LED head with the Devere 507 I will make some photograms:
expose > dev > stop > fix > wash
Then using the LED head with the Devere 507 I will make 35mm prints, then 35mm XPAN prints and then 617 prints!
While some of this will always be experimental eg cyanotypes and lumen prints, the goal with the DeVere 507 is to document enough when making a print to be able to reliably reproduce it. That is the ultimate goal, as per these marked up Magnum prints which show the steps involved in printing each specific negative.
If of use to anyone else, a couple of books I’ve been referencing a lot:
The Darkroom Handbook – a complete guide to the best design, construction and equipment. By Dennis Curtin & Joe DeMaio
The New Darkroom Handbook by Joe DeMaio, Robin Worth and Dennis Curtin
surprised robot?
first power on test – its bright!
the heatsink plate & LEDs will rotate 180deg & point down into the box…
which goes through diffusion to the neg holder & lens…
next step!