Opening and handling photographic paper in dim light

Purpose

To take a sheet of photographic paper out of its packet, work with it and put the packet back, without giving the paper any exposure you did not intend.

When to use it

Every time the black bag is opened: cutting sheets down, loading a contact frame or an easel, pulling one sheet for a test strip. It runs from the moment the bag opens to the moment it closes.

It does not decide whether your lamp is safe — that verdict comes from testing a safelight, which every time limit here assumes you already have. It does not cover wet prints, which belong to print processing, nor the ultraviolet-sensitive coated paper of Assignment 1, a different material with its own limits.

Part I runs this with no safelight in the room at all; step 3 handles that case.

Before you start

You should already know what your paper can see, from spectral sensitivity, and that time under the lamp adds to the printing exposure rather than sitting beside it — Kodak state that virtually all exposures are cumulative, and ILFORD that low-level fogging shows first as reduced contrast and highlights that are not clean, not as visible fog. What governs this procedure is your own measured safe working time, from the fog limit.

On the bench: the packet, still inside its box; a light-tight box or drawer for sheets in progress; a dry bench and dry, freshly washed hands; the safelight at the distance it was tested at; a pencil; scissors or a knife and a swept cutting mat if you are cutting; a clock you can read without lighting the room.

Level A on the classification rubric: a coated article handled dry, nothing weighed, dissolved or heated, and no liquid waste. The hazards are the knife and moving about in a dark room, not the material.

Procedure

The room

1. Sit in the room for five minutes with every light off, then look for a sheet of white paper held against a dark background. If you can see it, seal the leak — black tape for a small one, heavy cloth for the crack around a door — before you open anything.
2. Switch off or cover everything else in the room that emits: the timer display, indicator LEDs, a phone, the enlarger lamphouse, the gap under the door.
3. Put the safelight back where it was tested, and no closer than 1.2 m if it lights the bench directly. With no tested safelight — the Part I case, in the unfixed photogram — draw the curtains, bounce one low lamp off a wall well away from the bench, and treat every time below as a ceiling to undercut, not a budget to spend.
4. Dry the bench. Wash and dry your hands; the conservation rule for photographs is freshly washed hands and no contact with the image surface.

The packet

5. Fetch the box now and not earlier. Between sessions it lives cool, dry and closed, which is the condition the maker’s keeping figures are quoted for.
6. Open the box, then the inner bag, with the opening turned away from the lamp.
7. Take out only the sheets this run needs, count them, and write the count down.
8. Fold the bag shut, return it to the box, close the box and put it away — before anything else happens. Unused paper goes back into its original package, which is Kodak’s own instruction.

The sheet

9. Hold sheets by the edges. The emulsion side is the shinier face and it curls inward.
10. Keep every sheet emulsion side down on the bench, and put it into the developer emulsion side down, turning it over only once the image is up. The habit is Kodak’s, and it removes most of the exposure a sheet collects at the tray.
11. Label the back in pencil before you expose it: sheet, date, and whatever the log will need. Pencil, not ink.
12. Cut on the swept mat against a steel rule, away from your body, blade retracted whenever the knife is set down.
13. Start the clock as the bag opens and stop it as the sheet reaches the fixer. Keep the total inside your measured safe working time. ILFORD’s published limit for its resin-coated papers is four minutes of direct safelight illumination at not less than 1.2 m; your own figure replaces it downwards and never upwards.
14. Anything not in your hands goes into the light-tight box, not into a pile on the bench.

Closing

15. Return unused sheets to the bag, close the bag and the box, and put both back in the drawer.
16. Keep one unexposed offcut in the box as the control strip for the next fog test.
17. White light goes on only when the box is closed and every sheet is either in the fixer or back inside it. In a shared room, say so out loud before you reach for the switch.

How you know it worked

• Processed borders are white and the highlights clean. Flattened contrast is the first symptom, not visible fog.
• The count balances: sheets taken out equals sheets exposed plus sheets returned.
• The bag was closed and the box away before the white light went on.
• The log carries the light you worked under and the elapsed time, not just the exposure.

If a step fails

Step 1, the white card is still visible after five minutes. Seal what you can, and load and unload in a changing bag until the leak is found.

Step 3, there is no safelight and the room will not go dark. Work in a changing bag: cut and label the sheets first, under cover, and let the bag hold every sheet that is not inside a closed frame.

Step 6, the bag is torn, or the box was opened in white light. Treat the whole packet as suspect. Process one sheet with no exposure at all before you spend the run on it, and read paper storage fog for what else lifts a base.

Step 9, you cannot tell which face is the emulsion. Do not guess. Expose and process an offcut one way up, and mark the answer on the box so that the question is asked once.

Step 11, the pencil will not mark. The back is damp or greasy. Dry it and try again; do not write on the emulsion side, and do not substitute ink.

Step 13, you lost track of the time. The sheet is now a test strip. Process it as one, note what the borders look like, and start the run again with a fresh sheet.

After processing, the borders are grey. Two candidates, and one comparison separates them: a sheet from a different box, exposed and processed identically. Clean means safelight fog; grey again means the paper.

What to record

One line for the session: the date; the paper, its grade and its box or batch; the light you worked under, as filter, wattage and distance, or as the lamp and what it was bounced off; sheets out and sheets back; the elapsed time from bag to fixer; and the result of any fog test on the offcut. Note it on the box too when a packet behaves oddly — whoever next suspects that paper looks there first.