Enlarger!

I had pretty much given up on the idea of having my own darkroom. I don't want to spend much money on one and that's pretty much the only option there is. The one given to me by my dad's friend is a Vivitar. But I couldn't find much info on it and the info I did find was dismal. The other day, my dad came home and said, "look what I brought home for you." I looked around the house and couldn't find anything, I was thinking it might be a changing bag, since I was talking about needing one. I went outside and saw this big black thing sticking out of the back of my dad's truck bed. It was a Beseler 23cII Dual Dichro XL enlarger. So I was immediately stoked because I recognized Beseler from school, but I was sorta intimidated because I realized it was a color enlarger.

I then went online trying to find a manual. The only stuff I could find cost 10 bucks and off of ebay. I was willing to order them, but I decided to scour google and try Flickr. It's really amazing how easy it is to obtain stuff off the internet. I went to a film group on flickr and found a discussion about Beseler manuals, so I emailed the guy and he gave me access to a ftp (whatever that is). The manuals were good, but I couldn't download them, and the PDF's I made of the images were small and cut off words. Whatever, I thought, it's better than nothing.

Today I was searching stuff on the enlarger and I actually stumbled upon PDFs of the Beseler enlarger manuals at darkroompro.com

The enlarger itself is pretty dusty, but in good condition. I plan on thoroughly dusting it and keeping it under a trash bag while not in use. One problem is, that my house is pretty dusty in itself. I live right next to railroad tracks.

The enlarger came with a timer, color analyzer and some other box thing. And a 50mm lens, I think...the one you use for 35mm film.

New Pinhole

Well, school has just started. Today is Labor Day and I'm unfortunately missing my photo class due to the holiday. I'm taking Creative Photography at Palomar. We're going to be doing so much cool stuff. Right now we're working on pinholes, hand coloring, and toning.

This is the fourth pinhole camera I've made. It's a Christmas box from the dollar store. The first time I tested it, the whole image came out black so I had to pretty much cover the whole box with black tape.

I wanted to do something different with this camera, though. I remembered Peggy Jones (my photo teacher at MiraCosta) talking about using the whole box as a camera. So I used that idea and made a paper negative template to fit inside the whole box.

It may be hard to tell by the pictures I've posted, but the one on the bottom has a designed sketched into it. I thought the original template I made (on the top) was too boring and simple, so I drew inspiration from all the crosses in my house and made a more elaborate cross on the backside of the template.

But then I thought that the template was too small, so I made a bigger one that I intend to use for the remainder of the photos I am going to take.



I'll be posting scans of the final images once they're done!