It's been a long road.

[JamesD]

Hello. I used to be pretty active here years ago, before life got all up in the way. I was pretty active in the film photography section, especially in the darkroom and alternative techniques forums. Some who've been around forever and a day might remember my penchant for pinholes and paper negatives.

Around 2006-2007, near the end of my time in the Army, I had a darkroom in my 3x5 foot barracks room closet, which was kind of an experience unto itself, especially considering the fairly enormous Omega enlarger (but 135-only) I had been given as a gift by a local photo lab owner who was winding down the shop as the digital boom was taking off. When my Army time was up and I got on back home, my darkroom kit went to a local who was interested in getting started in processing his own film; I figured I'd get the 4x5 enlarger I had been longing for after I snagged a 4x5 view camera for very very cheap on eBay.

But, as I mentioned, life got all up in the way, and I moved back to Alaska, and despite a few false starts, I just never got back into it.

But I did get that 4x5 enlarger I'd been wanting.

It's been sitting in one garage, shed, or store room or another since 2018 when I bought it, also on eBay. At first, the seller said he could ship it to Alaska, but changed his mind when he looked at the shipping rates. So I had him send it to my mom's house, and then when I moved back to the lower 48, I eventually picked it up and brought it home, still in that beat up box. Today, I pulled out the box, opened it for the first time, and vacuumed out all the packing peanuts with the shop vac, and set about inspecting and assembling it.

It's a challenge when you don't know exactly how it all goes together and the parts are a little beat up and out of alignment, and you have no instructions, just some low-resolution pictures on the Internet and a few pages of partial manuals... But with only a few extra parts left over (there's always extra screws, you know?) it's now all put together--or almost, I still have to figure out the bellows, because there wasn't quite enough there to assemble them in.

So, I figured I'd hop on here and write a quick post reintroducing myself, catching up on the last sixteen years or so, and, of course, drop a quick snapshot of the evening's work.

I'll catch y'all soon. I've got photochemistry and film coming, and it's long past time.

Automega D3 autofocus enlarger, condenser head, with some accessories and the bellows but yet attached.

 

[wobe]

Greetings! I am myself relatively recent to the forum joining in the past couple of years or so. Although a keen amatuer film photographer and home developer its strictly by-the-numbers C41/DF96 and a patterson bucket and this only if I'm not feeling lazy and sending it off to the dev. shop!
Always good to see additional / returning film users, we are quite an endangered species!

 

[gk fotografie]

Hello. I used to be pretty active here years ago, before life got all up in the way. I was pretty active in the film photography section, especially in the darkroom and alternative techniques forums. Some who've been around forever and a day might remember my penchant for pinholes and paper negatives.

Around 2006-2007, near the end of my time in the Army, I had a darkroom in my 3x5 foot barracks room closet, which was kind of an experience unto itself, especially considering the fairly enormous Omega enlarger (but 135-only) I had been given as a gift by a local photo lab owner who was winding down the shop as the digital boom was taking off. When my Army time was up and I got on back home, my darkroom kit went to a local who was interested in getting started in processing his own film; I figured I'd get the 4x5 enlarger I had been longing for after I snagged a 4x5 view camera for very very cheap on eBay.

But, as I mentioned, life got all up in the way, and I moved back to Alaska, and despite a few false starts, I just never got back into it.

But I did get that 4x5 enlarger I'd been wanting.

It's been sitting in one garage, shed, or store room or another since 2018 when I bought it, also on eBay. At first, the seller said he could ship it to Alaska, but changed his mind when he looked at the shipping rates. So I had him send it to my mom's house, and then when I moved back to the lower 48, I eventually picked it up and brought it home, still in that beat up box. Today, I pulled out the box, opened it for the first time, and vacuumed out all the packing peanuts with the shop vac, and set about inspecting and assembling it.

It's a challenge when you don't know exactly how it all goes together and the parts are a little beat up and out of alignment, and you have no instructions, just some low-resolution pictures on the Internet and a few pages of partial manuals... But with only a few extra parts left over (there's always extra screws, you know?) it's now all put together--or almost, I still have to figure out the bellows, because there wasn't quite enough there to assemble them in.

So, I figured I'd hop on here and write a quick post reintroducing myself, catching up on the last sixteen years or so, and, of course, drop a quick snapshot of the evening's work.

I'll catch y'all soon. I've got photochemistry and film coming, and it's long past time.

Automega D3 autofocus enlarger, condenser head, with some accessories and the bellows but yet attached.

Nice to read that someone has used paper negatives, for me it was about 54 years ago that my brother and I were experimenting with 9x12cm photo paper in an old plate camera that we bought at a photo shop for almost nothing. Nowadays I sometimes use 5x4" photo paper with a 60 year old Polaroid Land camera that I bought a few years ago.
Since last year I've started doing something with film again on a very small scale, developing films myself but not printing with an enlarger yet, but I hope to get around to that this year.
The Omega brand never made it in the Netherlands, it was mainly Durst and outsiders such as Leitz and deVere. Through a relative of a classmate I was able to buy a deVere 5x4" as a photographer at the time and sold it years ago, by the way, last year I saw a deVere 8x10" for sale, but unfortunately I don't have enough space these days for such a beast. Good luck with the enlarger and of course your analogue photography.

 

[JamesD]

Nice to read that someone has used paper negatives, for me it was about 54 years ago that my brother and I were experimenting with 9x12cm photo paper in an old plate camera that we bought at a photo shop for almost nothing. Nowadays I sometimes use 5x4" photo paper with a 60 year old Polaroid Land camera that I bought a few years ago.
Since last year I've started doing something with film again on a very small scale, developing films myself but not printing with an enlarger yet, but I hope to get around to that this year.

There were a few of us here back in the day experimenting with paper negatives and working on the process, with different camera types. My personal area of focus with them was pinhole photography in 4x5, and I was contact printing them onto paper out of the same box. I'll have to do some searching (on here, probably!) to rediscover the exact process I was using, but I found it was not too hard to produce some really nice prints that way. Here's an example from World Wide Pinhole Photography Day of, if I recall correctly, 2006.

 

[JamesD]

Greetings! I am myself relatively recent to the forum joining in the past couple of years or so. Although a keen amatuer film photographer and home developer its strictly by-the-numbers C41/DF96 and a patterson bucket and this only if I'm not feeling lazy and sending it off to the dev. shop!
Always good to see additional / returning film users, we are quite an endangered species!

I'm fairly excited to get back to it, even if it's going to be a process for getting fully set up again. But I just got the message that my first shipment of dev and film showed this afternoon. No C-41 for me... yet. I'd like to try that, though.

 

[ac12]

I still have mine in the garage.
Been wanting to set it up for YEARS. But first I need to make a place for a darkroom in the crawl space under my house. As I get older, I don't know if that will ever happen.

 

[JamesD]

Small update.... I am --> this <-- close to being ready to make photos from camera to print again for the first time in sixteen years. I need to do some glass cleaning, attach a bellows, align lens and negative carrier platforms with the baseboard, mix some chemistry, and finish this roll of HP5.

And, well, put everything into place in the bathroom because I don't have a dedicated darkroom yet. But it's a big bathroom that never gets used.