[Coco] OT:press (was Book review)

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 11 January 2014 19:36:44 Glen VanDenBiggelaar did opine:

> Gene,
> I too, did my time in the Darkroom, In a 12 hour shift, I did batches of
> 30-40 rolls of B&W film (average of over 200 /night) then printed them
> out on a Durst which looked like long strips of toilet paper! Cut them
> out and helped in "paste up" making the pages by hand for the 15 or so
> weekly issues of the Various Trader mags oh and rolled film!. About '97
> we went all digital, eliminating the Darkroom, where I went to
> "paste-up" and still made the pages by hand after the digital pictures
> were printed out on a laser printer. The descriptions were printed on a
> separate sheet, and we cut and pasted each by hand with wax holding the
> master pages together. We then photographed the 4 pages (vertical
> camera) to make the film for the plate, then it went off to the (Film)
> stripping department to make the huge plates for the press. It was only
> about 1999 that we phased out paste-up and used a program called
> "Imposition" on the PC's to print it right to the film. It was a lot of
> tedious work, but a 12 hour shift flew buy in no time flat- we had
> deadlines to meat for each section of the magazines.
> 
Fortunately, I was never under that sort of deadline pressure, and even had 
time to play with the chemistry.  I wound up making a unicolor paper 
developer to my own recipe, and it was stable enough I could mix 16oz of it 
and spend the rest of the evening rolling the drum, for 8 absolutely 
identical 8x10 prints if I didn't tweak the dials on my Besseler 23/dichro 
head because "it just needs another cc05y correction."  I had an exposure 
meter, but it also read the safelight that was on while composing and 
cropping the print so in the end, the first print told you more than the 
meter.

The regular soup gave you 8 prints, all different because it was so 
alkaline it sat there, in a brown bottle in the warming bath at 85F, going 
sour by the minute.  My recipe worked at 100F to get the same drum rolling 
time (2 minutes) because I used carbonate instead of lye for the alkaline 
accelerator.  Dead stable development even 8 hours later, and didn't burn 
my hands near as quick either.

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Cheers, Gene
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