In my cellar I have a small half bath that is never used. I recently decided that it would make a suitable location for a small darkroom space. With a little preparation I was soon back into developing my own images. The nice thing about this particular space in my house is that it naturally resides in darkness. Being in the cellar there are no windows to worry about. What little light leakage there was, like around the door and in one small corner, was easily remedied with minor alterations. Another nice feature about this setup is that I have ready access to running water. A necessity for rinsing between development baths. I'll write more about that in a separate article. My decision for setting up a darkroom came about out of necessity for developing some new direct positive  paper from Galaxy Paper, a Kickstarter campaign I had supported. For my support I received a package of 25 sheets of 4x5 paper and the required chemicals to develop them. Now that I had the space it w...

Several years ago I purchased a used large format camera and had it modified to accept my dSLR camera (seen here). I basically turned a 4x5 view camera into a very large tilt shift lens. It serves its purpose. I now have a full range of movements not available in a standard tilt-shift. For one, a tilt-shift lens can tilt and shift or swing and shift. It just can't do all three. On my system I have tilt, swing, shift, rise and fall on both the front standard and rear standard. Now, if all this sounds like gibberish to you take a few minutes and google these terms. While this has nothing to do with the real subject of this post, it's always good to learn a little something in the process. In truth, I want to talk about putting my large format camera back to use as it was originally intended, to shoot 4x5 film. Or, as in my case, 4x5 photo paper (think pinhole cameras).