Setting Up Enlarger to Make a Print

Video Transcript

"So now once I have my negative loaded in my negative carrier, I'm going to put it in the enlarger. Notches go towards the back, towards the wall. This particular enlarger has a bar on the left hand side that you open up and close. Most enlargers have something very similar to this. My negative carrier is in, they call this a Stage, okay? It's in there. It's nice. An enlarger is like, you know, sometimes when I teach student and when I first started, I would look at this enlarger and just be like what is this? How, this is intimidating. I like to think of it as almost like a glorified copy machine and it sounds kind of funny but it makes sense. Where light is coming through a light source, through my negative, through a lens and onto my paper. And that kind of simplified it for me. So I know that my negative is in there. Again, I've my number 3 filter in there. And to recap about the lens, I always want to keep my lens set on about 8 or 11 of my F-stop. That's actually the sharpest point of an enlarger lens. Once that's all set up, I'm ready to start registering my easel."