Starting B&W Developing and Printing Sticky?

M

MoTR

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Hey,
As a newbie here feel free to tell me the error of my ways but .. :)

I think a lot of people appreciate the wealth of Darkroom experience people have here at RFF.
So how would the more experienced peeps here feel about putting together a "your first darkroom" sticky.

Cause I know that there are a lot of threads from people like me looking to start developing and not knowing very much. and with the info you all have Im sure you could collaborativly whip something together quickly.

Maybe split it into 2 section:

Developing
Printing.

Showing gear and whatnot.
I spent a few hours searcing and found a lot of threads have come up in the past about people wanting to start off and peole gicing the same advice each time. so to save your fingers the hasle :)

And even give equipment ideas.
For example purely through randomly reading a thread i found out that enlargers can be got cheaply?? The durst 600/606 models are like 100$ on ebay. I would never have known this (and my wallet thanks you for it :(..)

So how would ya all feel about a collaborative sticky thread on it?
 
I'd be happy to contribute my knowlege and opinions, though I have far more of the second. I'm a relative newcomer to B+W. About 3 years ago I was given some disused equipment, started experimenting, and I'm hooked. The wealth of free advice available online and some night classes are what I have to thank for where I am now. RFF is, among other things, "film users forum", and that's the primary reason I lurk here.
Anyone else?
 
I'm not sure these "stickies" are the best way to go with this. Either an FAQ or a wiki is better. Stickies just end up as a long series of hard-to-discern posts aboutt his developer vs that, etc. A wiki, for instance, would allow for better organization of pages. Solvent developers vs. acutance. Then different types of each. Separate section on development techniques, etc.

allan
 
MoTR said:
Hey,
I think a lot of people appreciate the wealth of Darkroom experience people have here at RFF.
Click to expand...
Darkrooms are the key to Zen. It completes the artistic process from pre visualization to completion.
Showing gear and whatnot.
Click to expand...
I'll show you mine if you show me yours :eek:

www.maquiling.org/darkroom

And even give equipment ideas.
Click to expand...
If you are cramped room....think Vertical slots.

But that distracts from the magic of watching images come out of trays.
 
kaiyen said:
I'm not sure these "stickies" are the best way to go with this. Either an FAQ or a wiki is better. Stickies just end up as a long series of hard-to-discern posts aboutt his developer vs that, etc. A wiki, for instance, would allow for better organization of pages. Solvent developers vs. acutance. Then different types of each. Separate section on development techniques, etc.

allan
Click to expand...

A dev wiki, that's a good idea Allan. Something like The Massive Dev Chart on steriods.
 
Bryce,
You've probably already looked at the examples, but a wiki is basically a multi-user editable content mangement system. Let's say you have a group of 5, 10, 15 users. Or 100. Each can edit a page, create a page, create links to other pages, add content, etc. Hopefully, the pages stay relatively clean. And everything is searchable.

Wikipedia is by far the most famous wiki instance out there. But it's merely one flavor. I have a pmwiki instance at http://photos.kaiyen.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php though I haven't done anything with it yet.

camerapedia isn't a bad idea, but I'm also willing to host it via pmwiki on my site, too.

allan
 
I never thought of a wiki actually!!
Definitly, wikimedia is such easy software to work with and infinitly customisable.
 
Well, I don't know anything about setting such a thing up, or how it works exactly, but the concept sounds great. I guess the end result is an average of many people's ideas and hopefully closer to the truth than individual experiences can be?
Anyone here know how to make the first step?
 
If you guys put in the work to create a detailed article with advise for first time film development send me a PM when you post it so I will be sure to see it and I will "sticky" it.
 
1 - I personally am not a HUGE fan of mediawiki. Does some things great, and it's perfect for wikipedia, but the way it handles some things is not great.

2 - the main reason I prefer pmwiki is that it's simple and straightforward. it's a lightweight wiki, yet very powerful. style sheets seem a bit simpler to get to and edit.

3 - if people want to, I continue to offer my pmwiki instance for this. or I can create a mediawiki one if people really, really, really want that.

allan
 
what's great about wikis is that...if its on the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T...its gotta be true right? I mean, if someone types it out on wiki, its a factual item right? :)
 
kaiyen said:
1 - I personally am not a HUGE fan of mediawiki. Does some things great, and it's perfect for wikipedia, but the way it handles some things is not great.

2 - the main reason I prefer pmwiki is that it's simple and straightforward. it's a lightweight wiki, yet very powerful. style sheets seem a bit simpler to get to and edit.

3 - if people want to, I continue to offer my pmwiki instance for this. or I can create a mediawiki one if people really, really, really want that.

allan
Click to expand...

Oh I misunderstoof if our offereing go for it man!
I reccomended mediawiki purely cause it was the only one i had personal experience with!
 
Okay. Page is still at:

http://photos.kaiyen.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage

I have now created a few pages and links. Many of them are blank.

First off, if you want to play around in pmwiki, go to the sandbox at:

http://photos.kaiyen.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.WikiSandbox

You can do whatever you want in there. A basic editing guide is at:

http://photos.kaiyen.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=PmWiki.BasicEditing

To edit a page, click on "edit" at the bottom. You can decide if you want to direct edit a page, or just create a link to a separate page. Perhaps, for instance, under "Development techniques" you might create a "Joe's Stand development" page rather than just put stuff there. We can always reorganized later.

To create a new page or make a link to an outside source, you just enter:

[[new page title]]

and the page is automatically created, but blank.

Some useful extra markup includes:

''text'' > italics
'''text''' > bold
\\ at end of line > line break, rather than a full new paragraph

Then save the changes. You will now see the link you've created, but it's got a ? mark on it because the page is empty. Click on the link and put some content in, and you're good to go.

I think that should do it. Again, one thing people learned from wikipedia is that some moderation is required. So, from time to time, I might clean up things a bit. If you're not sure about how you want to structure something, either try it out on the sandbox first, or just start making pages and see how it goes. You can always copy/paste stuff from one page to another, and delete the now misorganized and emtpy page.

I will work on the stylesheet at some point, don't worry. Pretty ugly for now.

I'll start by migrating the stuff from my personal website about chemicals and procedure, plus my own development times.

Any questions, just ask.

allan
 
Oh yeah - right now, there are no group/user restrictions. If I have to, I will start instituting them (spam, whatnot...or just bad writing). That's another nice thing about pmwiki - it's very easy to restrict pages and "webs" of pages. MediaWiki lets you do that, too, but on a more global scale (good and bad) and only via the php code, rather than an actual interface.

allan
 
Is there a "discussion" for pages?
Looks good, thats the only diffreence that I would miss id say.
 
Now that is cool Allan!

I think that a wiki is a much better solution for newcomers than reading throgh all potential threads.

Will there be any RFF linkage ('The RFF darkroom wiki')? - guess this would be more motivating..

Robert
 
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