The latest and most significant darkroom changes are the recent upgrades and modifications I made to my Caesar Saltzman/Berkey direct screen system graphic arts enlarger. This vertical film projector was born in the late 1960’s as a super precision graphic arts tool for use in the color printing industry. Used to make separations for commercial color offset printing, it has now been extensively modified to redirect its future use to black and white Ultra Large Format (ULF) film enlarging for fine art printing.

An 11×14 negative and the enlarger film holder. At 154 square inches, 11×14 is almost twice the size of 8×10

The enlarger head showing lens, filter turret and timer controlled mechanical shutter. Nearly half of the original equipment was removed.

Nearly 100 pounds of unneeded bellows, gears, and hardware were removed from its original 2500-pound weight and the enlarger light head/ film stage was re-engineered and turned 90 degrees counter clockwise so that it will project a horizontal image onto its base easel or to a nearby wall-mounted easel for mural size printing. This work followed two years of designing and building a new 11×14” camera to supply negatives for this enlarger. It sits on a concrete base connected down to the earth like it’s smaller cousin the adjacent Caesar Saltzman 8×10 enlarger. The existing wood floor could not hold either enlarger securely.

An 11×14 inch negative on the light table for inspection.

The 11×14’s functions are remote controlled; focus, height, fan, timer and filter selection are adjusted from a nearby control panel and hand held remote. The light source is a custom designed LED color head with a light array approximately 14×16”. I chose not to build a variable contrast light source for reasons of simplicity. This light source is digitally “tuned” to the correct blue/green wavelength to match traditional fluorescent cold light heads. Contrast is controlled by traditional variable contrast filters in an electro-mechanical rotating filter tray beneath the lens. Once the base wavelength of the color LED light source is “tuned in” the whole thing acts like a large cold light head enlarger which I am very accustomed to. All in all, this arrangement gives great new life to a huge, complex machine meant for something else.