Improving my enlarger; some crazy thoughts...

[douwe]

Hello everybody,

In the last few weeks I've been thinking about ways to improve my prints by making a fantastic enlarger setup. It's all fairly hypothetical at present, but I would like to share my thoughts with you.

It all started with the purchase of a Contax RTS III camera with some lenses. It was a deal I couldn't resist, although I must admit I was easily convinced. (The quality of my other contax G lenses played a part in the decision.) The camera has a 'real time vacuum' back that sucks the film onto the pressure plate just before exposure. It is said to improve sharpness with tele lenses and macro shots. You probably need to lock up the mirror and put the camera on a well dampened tripod, but still. Obviously if I am going to do that than I need to optimize my enlarger too!

So, here are some ideas. Please comment on them, and tell me what you think would work. Better ideas are most welcome of course! And yes, shooting a nice negative in the first place is probably the best way to improve my pictures ;-)

1) Modify my enlarger (Durst m605 b/w) so that I can adjust the orientation of the negative stage, the lensboard, and the baseboard for parallelism. Build in a mirror alignment system of some sort.

2) make a negative stage for wet mounting the negative with oil, like you do on a drum scanner. (only flat!) this would do away with newton rings, heal scratches, and ensure film flatness.

3) Make a vacuum easel to make sure the paper is flat too.

4) Put a blue-transmitting filter in the enlarger or the grain focusser to make sure you focus with the same wavelength the paper is sensitive to.

5) Buy a proper lens and a proper grain focusser. I got a good deal on a Rodenstock Apo-rodagon-N 50mm f/2.8, but I probably won't see any improvement over my EL-nikkor 50mm f/2.8 before I get perfect alignment and film flatness.

6) Build in a point light source, like a white light 1000 lumen LED or something. A real point source system is said to improve contrast and resolution quite a bit. The Durst doesn't have that, it takes a regular photocrescenta bulb. Perhaps the condensers on the m605 are designed to cope with the regular bulb, so the would have to be replaced with custom designed ones. (better buy some books on optics first!)

Thats it! Will I ever implement all these things? I really don't know.

Cheers,
Douwe

 

[sepiareverb]

The high end grain focussers have a blue filter for the eyepiece, but I've never been able to see through it enough to use it.

 

[Al Kaplan]

What the eff are you trying to accomplish here? Corner to corner crisp images of grain? A vacuum easel and oil on glass negative carrier? All of this might just make a bit of sense if you were making color seperation negatives, but nobody does that the size of a 35mm frame. Nor does anybody want to clean up the oily mess in your darkroom after a printing session or have to wash their negatives in Dawn dishwashing detergent every time they make a print.

I've said this before: Nobody but another photographer ever sticks their nose in a print and squints at the grain. Everybody else stands back a few feet and admires the photograph.

It's all to easy too get lost in the mechanics like this and lose sight of the reason we make photographs.

http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com

 

[dfoo]

I fully agree with Al. What is the point? Making a print will become such an ordeal that you just won't feel motivated to get in the darkroom.

 

[Benjamin Marks]

Douwe:

I think that correctly aligning your negative, lens and baseboard can help get the most out of your enlarger. The other stuff in your list seems like overkill to me -- the fluid mount in particular. The big sharpness killers, in my experience, are poor alignment and vibration. The vacuum easel can introduce vibration to the set up too. Here is what I would do: get the best enlarging lens you can afford (I think you will see a difference with the Rodenstock over the Nikon, BTW -- I certainly did when I switched from an EL-Nikkor to a Schneider Componon-S). There is a company called Zig-Allign that used to sell a mirror-and-diode alignment system. There was a three-point alignment jig that fitted under your easel and mirrors to check parallelism. It was deadly accurate, but you had to re-align for every exposure. Since you already have a good lens, if you were going to make one change, I'd start with that. Don't worry so much about the light-source. Making photographs is a little like cooking or any other science experiment -- you only want to change one variable at a time, otherwise you have no clue whether some variation you have adopted is helping or hurting. And Al does have a point -- don't get so lost in the weeds of optical precision that you lose sight of the story you want your images to tell.

Ben Marks

 

[Al Kaplan]

I bought one of the very first 50/2.8 El Nikkors when it first came out. That was 1962 and I'm still using it. It's sharp enough.

For 6x6 negatives I bought a new 80mm f/5.6 Schneider Componon on sale because the newer Componon-S had been introduced, and retired my cheapy 75mm Spiratone enlarging lens. It quickly came out of retirement. The Componon will clearly resolve Tri-X grain on an 8x10 or 11x14 and you can still see it with medium speed films a bit. The three element Spiratone just doesn't show any grain when printing medium speed films. Sometimes that's an advantage. The picture still looks tack sharp.

Improve your prints through printing techniques such as split filter printing, practice your burning and dodging, work on producing negatives with perfect exposure and great tonal range.

 

[thomasw_]

I love wet printing and creative time in the dark.....but this idea for me is like spiritual legalism; it would kill my creative impulse to head to the dark. If it were this way -- O baby how Solms would thank you! -- I think M8 sales at RFF would be slightly on the rise. 😉

 

[payasam]

I don't know if these improvements, heading towards perfection though they are, will make for recognisably better prints. Durst made good enlargers, Nikon made good lenses. Both good enough, which is what matters.

 

[titrisol]

All those improvements seem way overkill. Alignment is a cure-all most of the times so make sure that is in place.

So the question is, do your prints lack something?
Can you have any improvements by any of these?

 

[Al Kaplan]

There used to be big discussions in the photo mags about condensor enlargers vs. diffusion, how condensor with point light source had the most contrast but diffusion worked better with color, etc.

All true to some minor degree no doubt, but we ate it up, eagerly read it, and discussed it with one another at length. All that information did what? It kept us running to the drug store every month buying the latest copies of Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines where we read the latest test reports and read all those pages of ads.

I'm still printing 35mm on the Omega B-22XL that I bought new in 1964 through a 50/2.8 El Nikkor that I got in 1962, printing through a set of DuPont Varilour filters from about 1968. Worse: the filter holder below the lens that I jerry-rigged at the time has NEVER held the filters plane parallel with the film, and in the beginning I had good intentions of getting a set of filters to use in the filter drawer in the enlarger head. Here we are 45 years later and I never bothered.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Alignment matters.

So does a reasonably flat neg.

And even illumination and a good enlarger lens.

Apart from that, it's pretty much a waste of time.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Trius]

I sort of disagree with the comments about the vacuum easel. If properly done, you should be able to isolate any vibration from the enlarger. However, it is the last thing I would worry about.

The oil immersion carrier would be a total waste, IMO. Lens stage alignment is worth the effort.

I don't care for condensor enlargers, much less point source. I use cold light diffusion as I feel it gives me better tonal scale and hence, for me, better emotional content ... whatever the hell that means. 😉

If you are determined to use point source for perceived benefits regarding sharpness, you do realize you will need to recalibrate your entire exposure and development regimen, right? You may even need to go to a different developer, depending on your goals, the look you are trying to achieve.

Which leads us back to the question of your overall goals and objectives. Is there something specific, or did the vacuum film plate in the RTS simply set off a series of thoughts? Thinking can be dangerous if you start from the wrong end!

BTW, were I to do things over with my enlarging setup, about the only thing I would change would be to swap out the flourescent head for LED. A guy I know has constructed an elegant lamp using industrial LEDs that lets him use vc papers quite nicely.

 

[douwe]

Thank you for all the interesting replies so far. I think that we all agree that accurate alignment of the enlarger would improve things without too much work. So I'm thinking of a build in zig-align approach.
You also seem to agree that most ideas are a bit over the top. But I'm not too serious about them, I was just wondering what it would take for my enlarger to outperform the RTS vacuum back. I'm glad at least Trius picked up on this!
And about the blue filter for focussing, that will not work. The part of the eye one uses to see things sharply, the fovea, has very little cells that are actually sensitive to blue light. So it makes sense to use green as Patrick Gainer suggests. It pretty close to blue, and your eyes can actually see it quite well. in theory you shouldn't have to worry about the focus shift between blue, green, and red if you use an apochromatically corrected lens, so I'll just leave it there.🙂

 

[MartinP]

I'd just add that, with the price of used darkroom gear as it is, and if you need to mess about with the M605 to allow alignment, then it would be much simpler to just buy a De Vere or some similar professional machine (includes other Durst models of course) with all the alignment options you could possibly ever need, already built-in.

 

[Al Kaplan]

You're chasing a will o' the wisp. It's right up there with the desire to find the perfect woman (or man). At 26 it still seems like a possible goal. At 66 you realize just how much time and energy you've wasted. Go make some prints.

http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com

 

[nyx]

read post exposure by ctein, that should answer all your questions and more

 

[Tom A]

Having been a darkroom "nut" for decades - here is my 2 cent's (and Canadian ones at that!).
Alignment makes a huge difference, but the Durst is one of the enlargers that i find extremely sturdy and rarely go out. The Zip-Align system works - but it is a pain to use. The easiest way to check alignment is to take a piece of screen (thin - they stuff you put on the door to keeps mosquitos out and cats love to rip apart) and stick it on the negatives stage- as flat as possible (put it between some glass if needed). Turn on the enlarger - focus the center as good as you can and then check your corners. If the screen is needed to keep bugs out - take a piece of exposed and processed film and scratch a fine pattern in it with a needle and use that to check how well aligned your lens/neg carrier and easel is. You can make a print and check.
Start with the lens wide open and print one sprint from every aperture - you will find the 'sweet spot" of your enlarging lens. If your negative stage is rigid - shim your easel instead.
As for blue light focussing - it does work, but with a manual focus enlarger you have to check every time you focus (Long Live Focomat Ic's and their auto-focussing). You do a set of prints, first with blue light and then you "tweak" the lens for the best sharpness (bracket focussing) and lock it in.
Point Source is another game - Yes, you get amazing sharpness - but truly ugly grain, even with Tech Pan it is visible - particularly from 35 mm negatives. I have a Elcan 121 enlarger, point source with a stack of aspheric condensors - resolution on the easel is 275 l/mm!!!! - but it is virtually unusable due to grain patterns!

The LED light source is a good idea. I am working on a design for a LED based source for my Ic and my regular IIc. Because of the lesser heat from the LED's you can increase light output considerably.
Some of the new LED's can also be had in specific spectral output. A plate, holding a large amount of smaller LED's, green/blue/white could work as a split contrast printing head (white for focus - blue for high contrast - green for low contrast). A simple control panel/timer combined to operate it.
The oil immersion is only really necessary if you are printing 11x14 prints from Minox 8x11 mm negatives - and even then I suspect the benefit would be minimal at best.
Your best bet is to check the alignment - correct it and find the "sweet" aperture on your lens - and with the Apo Rodagon you have a very good lens. However, do check for decentering as the Rodagons had a bit of history with that.