First prints in a rented darkroom

Yesterday I paid for three hours in a community darkroom and came home with two prints. I had thought the safelight would be red and very dark. It is orange, and brighter than I expected. I could read the clock on the wall. After a year of loading reels blind in a changing bag, that felt like a lot of light.

The place rents enlargers by the hour to anyone who has done the introduction. I did mine two weeks ago, an hour with a volunteer who showed me the timers and which tongs go in which tray, then watched me run one test strip through the trays to prove I would not break anything. The enlargers stand in a row, each in a bay with a black curtain. Mine was at the end, grey and older than me, with a column that creaks when you raise the head.

I took two negatives. One from the Stockholm boat, one of the two archipelago frames on the HP5: the man on his jetty in a dressing gown, holding a mug, as we passed close in one of the narrow channels on the Swedish side. He is small in the frame and, as I already knew from the scan, slightly soft. The other from the mökki at Juhannus last year, one of the lab's negatives: the far shore near midnight, a black line of spruce and above it a pale grey sky. I took that one leaning the camera on a jetty post, and had doubted ever since whether it was sharp. Both had looked good as scans, which turned out to mean very little.

You put the negative in the carrier, blow the dust off, and the dust is still there. You open the lens all the way and focus with a grain focuser until the grain itself is sharp. Then you stop down to f/8 and make a test strip, moving a card across the paper every few seconds. Into the developer. After a few seconds the picture comes up out of the white, darkest parts first. I knew it would. I still stood there holding the tongs and forgot to count. I was also rocking the tray too hard. The two sliders I had used all year in darktable, print exposure and paper grade, turned out to be a lamp and a clock, and a numbered filter you slot into the enlarger head.

The paper was Ilford Multigrade RC. It washes quickly and dries flat, which helps when you are impatient. The Stockholm print worked with filter two and a half on the third try. The mökki one did not. The sky was paper white. I tried to burn it in, giving the top of the print extra light while I held a card over the rest, and got a grey band sitting above the trees like bad weather. Four sheets later the sky had some tone in it and the spruce had not gone muddy. The frame was sharp, which after a year I had stopped expecting. I stopped there and called it good enough.

In the next bay a woman spent the evening on a single negative, a harbour crane with the hook swung out over the water. She printed it again and again, each a little darker. She showed me one and asked what I thought, and I said it looked right. She did not agree, and started another.

A print is not a scan. I knew that, but I had not really thought about it. A scan sits on a screen, lit from behind, and will grow as large as the monitor. On paper it is just a small grey picture, and it looks different under every lamp in the flat. On the tram home I kept checking the envelope as if the prints might have gone somewhere. At the kitchen table the Stockholm print looks darker than it did by the fixer tray. The volunteer had warned me that prints dry down. I had forgotten by the time I got home.

Most of the test strips went in the bin. I kept one from the Stockholm negative, in the sleeve with the roll it came from.