I spent most of the week designing and building UV light source for contact printing. That will be on “dry side” of my darkroom – actually it will be in a completely different room than wet side (sinks) of my darkroom. The masterpiece of any dry side of any darkroom is a photo enlarger. I decided to skip this piece of equipment and replace this part of the process with contact printing. But you need a pretty big UV light source to make contact prints. Here it is: it is able to handle 20×24″ prints in 24×28″ contact frame. It has 16 24″ fluorescent tubes – black lights, 8 electronic ballasts, 8 fans to cool the lights and 2 power supplies to power the fans. It is almost done. I just need to add cover and build a stand for it.

Also, I almost finished gigantic vertical cascade print washer for 20×24″ prints. And of course it is made of plywood and covered with epoxy paint. I just need to hook up drainage for the washer.

Oh, and I built a new computer. Yes, digital darkroom is well and alive and it even got better. With 24GB of memory and SDD drive my Photoshop is chewing gigabyte images much faster now.