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xxClyde

PostPosted: Thu May 03, 2007 3:30 pm


I'm starting a photography module at school using film and a manual slr. It's going pretty good so far.
But today when I walked in to the darkroom to see how my negatives turned out after hanging them to dry, I didn't see them. I thought they might've put them in a draw or something so I started nosying around until I found my film in a pile of other negatives just tossed behind some equipment on the counter.
It made me kind of pissed. I don't really want my negatives to get scratched or get a lot of dust and I'm thinking the other students would probably think the same. You'd think they could take better care of them?

Discuss:
How do you/your school store your negatives?
Any simular stories?
PostPosted: Mon May 07, 2007 6:55 pm


xxClyde
I'm starting a photography module at school using film and a manual slr. It's going pretty good so far.
But today when I walked in to the darkroom to see how my negatives turned out after hanging them to dry, I didn't see them. I thought they might've put them in a draw or something so I started nosying around until I found my film in a pile of other negatives just tossed behind some equipment on the counter.
It made me kind of pissed. I don't really want my negatives to get scratched or get a lot of dust and I'm thinking the other students would probably think the same. You'd think they could take better care of them?

Discuss:
How do you/your school store your negatives?
Any simular stories?

We have a flim drying closet in which we all hang our negatives. It's just basically wat you imagine a large, perhaps eight foot tall, closet looks like. Inside there are three wires running across up the top. Once our negatives are developed we clip them onto the wires and add a clothespin to the bottom so they don't curl when drying. The fact we have a specially designated out-of-the-way area for negatives pretty much prevents people from tossing them to the side when they get in their way. I mean, people at my school generally don't have a tendency to purposefully mess up other people's negatives, but I have seen somebody who've been careless enough to knock other people's negatives down when putting their own in, and not bothering to at least hang them up.

I left a negative in the negative carrier once, forgetting to take it out and put it away. Normally when this happens we take it out and tack it up on top of the whiteboard. The person who came in next period just took it out and tossed it into the lost and found box like it was nothing. Kinda pissed me off, everybody forgets their negatives at one point or another. The least they could've done is what they'd want others to do and tack it up.

And then there are the bums that don't drip over the trays for the full fifteen seconds we try to advertise so much, thus polluting the chemicals. Not fun having to change them every other day; it's both a large waste of time and money.

Can't forget those people who put their prints on the drying rack not even bothering to squeegee the rest of the water on it, ending up in water dripping down onto the prints on the bottom racks. Way to ruin what could've been a final print - hence the reason why I use a blotter book now. It's rather sad one can't trust people in cases like that. Oh and there's also the people that make room in the dryer by putting wet prints into the dry box, which makes them attach like glue to the dry prints already below them and any later prints put in on top of them while they're already wet.

Hmm... anything else I get sick of... Darkroom chatter! Dear god, it gets so noisy at times in there. Also people that don't wash the equipment they use for development - IE the contains, lids, dry reels, etc. Nothing like having to rinse out dry reels because their dirty since the guy before you was lazy. After that, you have to wait five minutes or so to dry.

There are also those enlargers whose timers don't work well and so you end up exposing your paper more than you wanted to, simply because the control box you got is crappy. I guess enlargers don't count as humans though. Still, the thing that bugs me most out of everything there are those who don't bother dripping. Nothing like spending every other day switching out chemicals because people don't bother following the fifteen second rule.

End rant. =D

Palundrium


xxClyde

PostPosted: Tue May 08, 2007 4:11 pm


Whoo, yeah.. gotta love darkroom pet peeves! xD
That closet sounds cool but our darkroom is so small! D; Some of the students just don't care about other peoples negatives. It makes me angry.
Wow, your darkroom sounds like a busy place! There's about.. 5-7 students using our darkroom right now, out of the whole school.
PostPosted: Wed May 09, 2007 3:39 am



Our class is full of pretty much the same kind of people. The way we dry out negatives, it by hanging them with clips on a clothesline, off to the side. I know this isn't that great of a way, but it seems to work nicely for us. From the line, it goes straight to negative carrier sheets.

ThE PaTTerN QueeN


Palundrium

PostPosted: Wed May 09, 2007 11:04 pm


xxClyde
Whoo, yeah.. gotta love darkroom pet peeves! xD
That closet sounds cool but our darkroom is so small! D; Some of the students just don't care about other peoples negatives. It makes me angry.
Wow, your darkroom sounds like a busy place! There's about.. 5-7 students using our darkroom right now, out of the whole school.

Oh there's only one pet peeve, and that was the darkroom chatter. The rest are actually legitimate things one might get frustrated with, most of which involve the unnecessary ruining one of your prints or negatives. For example, today, I was framing things for the show. I had a stack of other mounted prints I finished that I was planning on window matting and then framing. The very top print I always keep a crappy mounted print that I don't plan on using, because in that case if some buffoon comes along and does something that might affect the surface of the photo or the mounting board, it happens only to the top one so it doesn't really matter.

And so later on some girl I guess took her print out of the wash and must've flapped it around a bit or something and got a big old drop of water on the mounting board of the top print. First time it's actually happened to me, and boy was I happy I've been taking the precaution the whole time. It would've been a whole 'nother two days or reprinting up a final print, stippling, and dry mounting to make up for that bloody drop of water on the board. Only thing that gets me though is that whoever did it didn't say anything to me... and it was kind of hard to miss that big old drop of water on it. *shrugs* I hope they though it was a final mounted print, that way they at least feel guilty. =p
PostPosted: Thu May 10, 2007 1:20 am



WOW
you guys have some baad times in the dark room.
the closest ive ever gotten to some shitty stuff,
is not developing my negatives well enough and getting funny blotches on the shots or just getting them purple.
which means i have to refix it.
D:
hee hee
yeah we have a drying cabinet for the negaitves, its just some string of sorts and clips,
just clip it up and let dry for one hour.
we have a seperate cabinet for prints.
its the same sort though.
8D

El Moo

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Film & Darkroom

 
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