MorseBlog

I have been steadily modifying my Meopta enlarger that I bought for £15.00. I started with raising it up to allow larger prints. Then I upgraded the lenses as I saw I was losing sharpness on the edges. Then because I wanted to stop down the lens for better sharpness I changed my 75 watt bulb to 150 watt. More light helped immensely with exposure times with stopped down large prints. On the other hand  smaller prints suddenly became challenging as I could not stop the lens down enough and I kept running into sub-8-second exposures even at f22. Though I have automated my enlarger  and that makes the short exposures accurate, there is not much time for dodging and burning. Finally I decided I could improve the setup using the now unused filter drawer. Since my automation project uses below-the-lens filters the filter drawer is unused. I bought a pair of single stop ND filters (Cokin P Series P152 0.3 ND2 - 1 Stop Neutral Density Filter) and carefully cut them to fit the fil...

I recently purchased a couple of Photon Beard easels. They had a reputation of being quite good. The reason for this is that my only easel to this point was an LPL 8x10 easel that I got for a good price. After a little paint and refurbishment it was good as new and has served me well. For larger prints I decided to economize. I bought a magnetic white board and a roll of magnetic strips. I hang the whiteboard from my cabinets and then tilt my enlarger sideways to project the image. It fits 12x16 paper in landscape or portrait position and could handle 16x20 in portrait as it is presently hung. The setup was serviceable but not simple over the past couple of years. Holding up the paper and trying to pin it down with magnets can be frustrating under safe-light conditions. It is made more difficult when heavy FB paper is used if it has a pronounced curl as the magnets are not strong enough. Furthermore the margins are inconsistent. As I say passable; but the frustration got the better o...