Photographic Printing & the Easel

Video Transcript

"So this is the easel that I'm going to be using today to make a print with. It is a 4 bladed Bessler easel. Fairly expensive. These easels go for anywhere between $150 to $250. But pretty much a necessary tool in the darkroom. And a tool you can really make your prints look beautiful with. But one of the hardest things, and this really did absolutely drive me crazy. I could make a great print but I couldn't get a straight print. And that really took me a while to understand how to do. So what I have here is an old piece of paper, photographic paper. Important to use photographic paper because believe it or not, how heavy or how you know the width of this paper is important. And what I'm going to do is I put it in one of these slots here. I'm putting it in the middle slot. It's the slot for 5 X 7 paper which is what that image is and what I do is I line it up to the marks that I've traced already and this saves me a ton of time, especially when I'm printing with a full framed negative carrier. Meaning that I want to see that black line around there. And basically all I've done is I've moved these blades to exactly the points where I've traced out so I get a nice even border on my print."