Saturday, March 12, 2011


Working with the Zone VI enlarger.

Here is an example of the two test exposures I made one with the soft contrast light, the other with the hard contrast light and the final print done with two seperate exposure based on my best guess at what combination of exposures will give me a mid zone gray and a true black.  The upper left image is the soft contrast print. The light from the soft contrast lamp is much brighter but takes a much longer exposure to impact the paper in this case 25 units of time with the dial on the soft light set at G.  This gave a unit of exposure that was about .5 of a second in real time.  The hard contrast lamp units of exposure were from 2.4 to 5.8 units though each unit of time was probably over 2 seconds in real time with the hard contrast light set at E.  I settled on a 5 unit exposure with the hard contrast bulb.  Two exposures one for 25 units of soft contrast light and 5 units of hard contrast light were probably closer to 23 seconds in real time.  The Zone VI enlarger has way too many variables and it is taking me time to get a handle on how to make a proper print.  At this point in time I am still hanging on to my old Omega enlarger with a V-54 cold light  that I can use with filters and variable contrast paper.  The Zone VI enlarger uses two seperate bulbs and contrast is a variation on time and light volume from each bulb.  I haven't been able to find a definitive instruction guide to using the Zone VI so I am still experiementing. 

2 Comments:

Blogger Lorita OLeary said...

I admire your ability to even do what you are doing with those enlargers. I remember not being very good at that. You have good results. Hang in there.

12:36 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I have always loved working in the darkroom and think todays "photographers" miss out on a lot of the magic and alchemy of chemicals and film and paper. Still a days work for a couple of prints can seem futile at times.

9:04 AM  

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