Enlarging Film

To enlarge a picture, you first place the negative in the film carrier, remove any dust with a blast of compressed air & place the film carrier into the enlarger. Arranging the picture to the desired size. Turn off all white light & only work under the safe light, which is typically red.

Working in a darkroom is the most enjoyable part of working with film. This technique is open to experimentation. It's not so rigid as developing film can be. If you are unsatisfied with your result, you can try again. You can enlarge the picture, crop the picture, adjust the tone, fine-tune the contrast & even tone a print.

Open the lens wide open, meaning the smallest aperture, so that you can focus the picture. To do this you will use a grain focuser. Fine-tune the bellows of the enlarger until the grain of the film is in focus.

Stop the aperture down to an f-stop in the middle range of the enlarger lens. Place a strip of photo paper in the easel, covering most of it up except for about an inch. you are going to make a check strip. Expose the paper for approximately 5 seconds. Now uncover another inch of the paper & expose it again for the exact same amount of time. Continue to do so until the entire strip of paper is exposed.

Developing the photo paper takes four steps. These are developer, stop, fix & water. Follow the instructions that came with the chemicals. Typically the developer take two & a half minutes; the stop bath, 30 seconds; the fix, 2 minutes; & the water bath at least 10 minutes better yet, 30 minutes then hang the print to dry or place on a drying rack.

After the fix, you can turn on the white light in the room & see your check strip. Check the strip to see which exposure time works best for the picture. Counting from the lightest picture to the darkest in increments of 5 seconds to determine the correct exposure time.

If the picture isn't desirable, you can fine-tune the enlarger lens either up or down an f-stop as needed. Or fine-tune the exposure time as needed & repeat the check strip process.

Now that the exposure time is set, place a new piece of photo paper in the easel & expose the print for the determined amount of time. Continue to the development phase as described above.