I was lucky to spot this thread in Clubsnap, someone giving free lesson on black & white dark room printing!

I'm always amazed by members in clubsnap, who quiet often they "give back" something to community.. Once I found member gave free film, or old camera, scanner, and just only last month member give his whole set of dark room equipment, enlarger, chemical and papers.. wow...


So, OK, get back to free printing lesson, or they call it "sharing session". This kind guy, named Ervine invited us to his studio, and taught us the basic printing technique until we confident enough to try ourself. In fact, through out the session, we actually did our own printing, he showed us how to setup and discuss how are we going to print our negatives.

At first, I expected, this was going to be a simple printing demo or something. But to my surprise, he allowed us to handle the enlarger from the first minutes. He showed us how to make test strips, and then how to justify them and came out with one straight print. Not only that, he continued to discuss with us on how to improve the print by burning and dodging. Wow! He helped us to make a timing strategy on how to implement those dodge& burn during printing, including the use of different grade of contrast filters.

Only 2 guys came to this session on Friday night 2-Nov-07. Each of us gave $5 contribution which is nothing compared to cost of chemicals, papers, and his time! We printed at 6"x8" Illford papers from our 135 and 120 (6x6) negatives.

We took almost 6 hours in dark room, used up 20 sheets of paper to come out with 5 final prints. This is considered fast and efficient, according to him, since some "printing master" often took days to produce single high quality print.

And of course, we can not turn ourself into print master only in one night, but at least this session has opened us to the world of B&W printing, and up to us, if  later we want to refine and perfect our technique.

It was fun and enjoyable experience. Hopefully someday I have my own simple dark room, or at least has access to one of rental darkroom here in Singapore.  (***)