Large Format Once More

  I recall seeing the little room off the dining room for the first time while touring the house where I have lived for the past fifteen plus years with the real estate agent. At the time it evidently served as a sort of basic man cave. Lacking the bay window sized video screen one might associate with the more ideal sort of man cave it never the had been designed to be a place where one would want to go to take a load off at the end of a day, a Three Stooges poster on the wall dispelling any notion that this was the domain of the lady of the house. On taking ownership this became a sort of junk room, a place to put things there seemed no other place for a few years, but when I started a small photography out of the house and needed a base of operations this room was cleared out and spruced up, whereupon it became know as "The Office". Though it retained that title years after I moved on to other things professionally its role had, in reality, reverted to the same sort of man cave it was the first time I saw it, excepting for the general character of the images hanging on the wall. 

When I started giving serious thought to setting up a darkroom in which I could finally do real enlargements again I considered a few possibilities - there's the dungeon-like basement but it's far too dank, an attic but it's like a sauna in summer, and so it was that I settled on the little bathroom off the kitchen. My working space would be the area over the bathtub (that no on had used as a bathtub since we moved in). I figured I could use the tub below for print and negative washing though in practice this has become storage for larger items there seems no alternative for.. The Durst enlarger I picked up from a local ad was just about the best compromise I could come up with - as large as I could possibly make work though it does make things cramped, and though 6x6 is supposed to be its maximum it can just barely handle negatives from the RB67 with the custom carrier I made if I don\t mind losing just a smidge off the sides. With the enlarger and timer in place there's just enough room to the sides for three 8x10 trays though this is cramped at best, especially as there are a growing number of chemistry bottles competing for the space that have no other home. It can all be made to work, but it's not pleasant which to be frank is a major reason I haven't done as much printing as I had hoped by this point. 

The office never got considered in any of this because... well, it was the office. Not only that but the design of the room didn't lend itself to darkroom use, built in work surfaces were too narrow for enlargers, there is no ready access to plumbing and as if that weren't enough it had a louvred door. I would just have to find a way to make do with the space I had, perhaps by finding a way to stack trays or putting in extra shelves somewhere. 

Then came the day I stumbled across a local Kijiji ad for a well seasoned but perfectly functional Beseler 4x5 enlarger along with an array of film carriers and lenses at an affordable price. Aside from having to put up with the cramped quarters, the idea of accepting my lot and making the best of things with my tiny makeshift darkroom came with another cost - it meant that getting back to large format photography would forever be an impracticality for me. Sure my 8x10 pinhole camera should be workable since contact prints would be as large as the biggest enlargements I could do anyway, but that's a bit of a sideline for me. Meanwhile I had 4x5 equipment languishing on the shelf - a working camera and a lens which, thanks to an unexpectedly successful DIY repair once again had a working shutter, along with a full compliment of 4x5 film holders. Now here was this ad to remind me of that whole region of the photographic world, one I used to enjoy, that I was for all practical purposes excluded from for the foreseeable future. 

Then I began to think. Was there a way to section off a part of the basement that could be kept dry, clean and dark? (Answer- not without great effort... and even then.) What about a window mounted air conditioner to keep the attic cool? (Answer- not without a significant increase to my carbon footprint and electric bill.) Could I encourage my teenage son to get a place of his own so I could use his room? (Answer- legally, not for a few more years.) A week went by without a definite answer coming to me, but I could stand it no more and finally I called about the Beseler.

Too late it seemed. The seller informed me that someone had called from out of province expressing an interest. They would be through town in a couple of weeks and the seller had agreed to hold it for them. I left my contact information with them in case their potential buyer didn't go for it. I suppose I could have just shrugged it off and continued with the status quo but the seed had been sown. Maybe it would take a while but it was now set I was going to get back to large format in the darkroom.

Now if you've been following along for a while you might be asking yourself what the big deal is. After all, I must seem positively giddy at times over the medium format kit I own so why not stick with that? The truth is it's not so much the format, meaning the actual physical dimensions of the negatives, that is the big attraction for me. Don't get me wrong, I'll take the bigger negs thank ye very much, but it's really the cameras themselves that are the attraction. Like their smaller 35mm cousins, medium format cameras such as the Mamiyas and Bronicas I have are hard bodied cameras, essentially consisting of a rigid box with a lens attached to the front and film in the back so that film and lens are permanently held square on to each other. With the typical large format camera film and lens are separated by bellows which, due to their flexible nature, permits the two to be shifted and tilted with respect to each other. The whys and where-to-fores of all of this go beyond what I'm willing to delve into today, but in the end this gives the photographer controls that can be used to manipulate perspective and the plane of focus.

One example of a time I really wish I had this kind of control was when I took this shot...

This was taken with a Mamiya RB67 and to be fair it's one of my most successful images from last winter. Scale is a bit ambiguous here and I suppose one could imagine reaching that hill would require an ambitious hike but in truth I could have cleared it and then some by throwing a snowball. The nearest of those windblown dune features then is less than a metre away from the lens. Luckily the lens I used stopped all the way down to f/45 because I needed all the depth of field I could get and the foreground is still not as crisply sharp as I would have liked. That's because with a rigid bodied camera critically sharp focus occurs at a fixed distance from the lens. Imagine everything at that distance forming an imaginary wall, and this wall becomes the plane of focus. A 4x5 camera with even the most basic movements would have allowed me instead to tilt the lens and alter this plane of focus to match the lay of the land rather than that imaginary wall fixed at a certain distance from the lens. I could have stopped down less (stopping down too much actually results in less sharpness due to diffraction effects which is why selecting a middle of the road aperture setting is usually ideal) and achieved better sharpness in the foreground than what I got. 

My bedroom/darkroom circa 1993

Back to our story though it was long about this point when it occurred to me that the office was a viable alternative to the unworkable ideas I had been mulling around with. The idea wouldn't be, at least for the time being, to turn it into a complete darkroom. What I had in mind rather was returning to an idea I had used for my first bachelor pad darkroom, a separate dry room and wet room. Back then I fully blacked out the window of my bedroom (the dry room) where the ancient 4x5 enlarger I owned at the time was permanently set up. There prints were exposed, placed into a dark bag so they could be transferred to the windowless bathroom (the wet room) to be developed in trays. Not ideal to be sure but far superior to my current situation. Converting the office as the dry room and the current darkroom as only a wet room would not only allow me to devote the whole space to develop prints, it would also give me the extra storage space to clear out the bathtub underneath and use it as intended. The whole thing could be a go if I could just get my hands on the enlarger I needed.

I imagined I might have to wait some time before another suitable enlarger became available locally but even finding a bargain online could quickly turn into an expensive proposition when it came time to pay shipping on something as bulky as a 4x5 enlarger, but my luck took a turn for the better when the owner of the Beseler contacted me to say the other buyer was no longer interested. The next evening I was bringing it home. It now sits in its own space in the (former) office where it could be used as is though I'll probably need to build a proper stand for it. Today I blacked out the window and I'm about three quarters of the way to completing the installation of a solid door. I have a little way to go yet but no sense waiting, there are fresh exposures sitting in film holders even as I write, waiting to be developed.