AJG

Thanks for this--I haven't actually run into this problem yet, but it is good to know what will actually work.

Velcro has been around for a long time--at least 50 years, I think. The first soft box I bought came from Calumet in the late 1980's (I think it was made by Photoflex, but I'm not sure about that) and it was a one piece unit with the front diffusion panel permanently attached. There was an inner diffusion panel that had clips attached to elastic the you got to from the inside of the soft box. I later got rid of it because the white interior gradually turned a pale green so it was useless for the color transparency film that I was using at the time. Lesson learned--the soft boxes that I bought after that have silver interiors that haven't changed color over the last 20 years. Also, taking that soft box apart required pliers to get the fiberglass wands out of the strobe adapter. The White Lightning ones I mostly use now go together like umbrellas and are much easier to assemble and take down for storage.

They should be close to developer temperature, but they are not as critical as developer temperature is. If they are within 65-75 ° F you should be OK. If the fixer temperature is too low it won't work; if it and the stop bath are too high then you might get reticulation on your film which will result in very large grain clumps. This applies to wash waster temperature as well, so don't let that get very high or very low.

B&W developing is really inexpensive--a tank and reel for 120 film, chemicals, some storage bottles for chemicals (wine bottles with screw tops are fine) and a couple of graduates are all you really need. A closet at night should be dark enough for loading the tank and then the rest of the steps happen in room light. If you get into it more you can buy a changing bag so you can load the tank any time. Get one with a frame to hold it off your hands if you do buy one since these bags are usually lined with rubber to make them light proof and your hands can get hot and sweaty if the bag is draped over them while you're loading. Good luck!

Do you have a light meter? You will want one to get accurate exposures. You can download an app to a smartphone or buy a meter (anywhere from $10 for a 1950's selenium meter that might work well enough to hundreds for something new that would probably be unnecessarily complicated for you at this point). As for film, 400 ISO films like Kodak Tri-X and Ilford HP5 would be a good choice for B&W and I would recommend color negative over reversal film for both lower cost and greater exposure latitude. Arista films are a reasonable lower cost alternative for B&W. If money is a big issue, developing your own B&W film is inexpensive and easy to do, as well as giving you results fairly quickly.

I also hated print spotting and used to use canned air to clean off negatives with the enlarger light source on so that any dust was visible. Switching to a cold light head from a condensor light source also helped a lot.

Good luck with that--I don't envy you that job.

To fill in for the 18th: Forsythia. My usual Pentax K 5 w/50-200 Pentax zoom. .

I can't answer specifically about your Beseler head, but a Zone VI head that I used for 15 years had 2 cords--one that went to a heater and another that went to a timer. I don't think that the lack of a heater would have made the light uneven but it certainly effected how long an exposure that a print required. Have you noticed that printing exposures are particularly long with this head?

Unfortunately this link says no longer available. Another option is water base felt tip markers which can be found at art supply stores. I have a set of markers that were marketed for photographers that I bought 25 years ago that have worked well for print spotting. I doubt they are still made.

You are indeed correct that independent thought is not encouraged very often in our current society. I have often explained to my photography students that Picasso, famous for his non realistic paintings, knew how to draw in proper perspective but chose not to because that didn't allow him to say what he wanted to say. His work didn't arise out of ineptitude. And on the flip side a good friend of mine who went to a fairly famous art college discovered to his horror that they hadn't taught him how to properly gesso a canvas before making a painting, something he found out the hard way when paint started flaking off in a few months. I suspect that most of the students you talked to won't have the discipline to pursue a career in the arts, which isn't easy even if you work hard. There are only so many "conceptual artists" who can be supported by galleries and museums, and these artists will have to work hard at self promotion if they aren't making interesting art.

While I agree that most of the time the faults lie with ourselves, there is is lot of poorly designed equipment out there. Many of these items are designed by engineers and marketing people who are not photographers and while adding more features can be attractive from a marketing standpoint it doesn't always lead to equipment that is intuitive for photographers to use. The attempt to build in technical knowledge in the form of auto exposure and auto focus, while helpful for most people, doesn't always lead to the best results. And menus on DSLRs? How many hours have we spent learning how to control our cameras when something from the 1950s can be immediately obvious to someone with some fairly rudimentary photographic knowledge.

Try Freestyle--they seem to be the ones keeping older tech available.

I have always gotten more reliable exposures with my Vivitar 285 on auto than with my much more expensive Pentax 540 Z flashes with TTL auto. The Pentax flashes frequently over or under expose on TTL where the Vivitar 285's almost never do. The Pentax flashes are superior in many ways--they recycle faster on the same batteries, their manual output is far more adjustable and they are much more sturdily built but their exposure automation with every Pentax DSLR that I have used is hit or miss.

Possibly--SanDisk offers recovery software for its cards for free for a period of time after purchase. I don't know about other companies.