Ever since I started developing my own film in early 2006 (and really, for years before that) I've wanted to buy an enlarger and learn to make my own prints. Developing film is fine, and you do have a degree of control in that process, but it's really in the printing process that the fun really starts. Or so I'd always heard.

Finally I get to find out for myself; for the last few months I've been working on setting up a darkroom, and two days ago I made my first black and white print. And it's just as fun as I'd always heard.

I've had the chemicals for months, and lightproofing the bathroom wasn't a major challenge. The main limitation, of course, was the enlarger. I held off on buying one while I was in Puerto Rico, because I planned to move before long and it made no sense to buy something so large and unwieldy just before an overseas move. But once I made it up to Covington, I started watching eBay for enlargers. There are quite a few available, but most are designed for smaller film formats. I definitely wanted something that could print large format 4x5" negatives, since that constitutes a significant portion of my film use.

Large format enlargers aren't all that rare either, but because of their size, sellers are almost never willing to ship them. So for months I watched eight or ten great enlargers come and go, and I had to give them a miss because they were located in Ohio or Arizona and I wasn't ready to drive 30 hours to pick them up.

But finally last month I found a great one whose seller was willing to ship, and it came with seven lenses to boot. Most enlargers come with none, or one at the most. The price was even on the low end; most of the units I'd been interested in tended to run in the $300-500 range, whereas I won this auction for $215. I sent off my money and set about lightproofing the bathroom.

The enlarger arrived a few weeks ago, and I can tell why nobody's ever willing to ship these things — it must have been an incredible pain to package up. It arrived in three large boxes, fully disassembled, with all the fragile parts packed in foam in their own smaller boxes inside the larger ones. Thanks to that careful packaging it arrived safe and sound, but I would have hated to be the one to pack it.

For now I've got the enlarger set up on a folding table, which seems to be working fine so far, but I get the impression that the table can just barely support the weight (about 60 lb) so this definitely isn't a permanent solution. Besides, just as with a camera, it's important to have your enlarger mounted on a stable base to minimize vibration, and this wobbly table is anything but that. Bryan and I have already drawn up plans for a table to sit in the bathtub. It will be a sheet of 1" pine with six 4x4" legs, and it should provide all the stability and surface area I need. It will also allow the toilet to be used, so that I don't have to sacrifice the bathroom entirely — the shower will be unusable, but I'm much more willing to give that up. In the five months I've lived here that shower hasn't been used once. If I ever do have overnight guests, they can just use my shower in the master bathroom.

We'll probably be building that table in the next week or so, but in the meantime I'm having all kinds of fun making prints with the setup I've got now. What I'd always heard is true — a black-and-white print on silver gelatin paper really does have an incredible tonality that just can't be compared to inkjet prints. My only frustration now is how few of my negatives seem worth printing — I really haven't taken many pictures on film that I like much. I guess that's just incentive to get out and start shooting more.