Hello all,

Thank you very much for your collective recent help with my Enlarger Problem I. I said I was not going to post part II till I got my scanner working, but that is turning into a hassle, so I'm going to try. I will post the print this weekend if necessary.

The third photo I printed in my photo printing session on Saturday night was taken at night, and had a black sky. It was also a very thin negative, since I forgot to adjust the film speed on my light meter and underexposed two stops (the shutter was open only 15 minutes, instead of over an hour! I did adjust the wrong reading for reciprocity, though.) I liked the shot fairly well, apart from its underexposure, so I printed using a #4 contrast filter to try to coax some contrast from it.

That was somewhat successful, except that the print had small white "dots" all over it, as well as a few larger (dime-sized) whitish areas. (The small dots were white, whereas the larger spots faded from fairly white in their center to light grey). This made me sad, since I figured that the negative must have had some dust and errors on it that I hadn't noticed, but when I looked at it very carefully, I could see nothing. I wondered if there were a systemic error, so I printed another, utterly thin and underexposed negative that I had (i.e., pure black) and it had the same effect.

I started wondering if it might be my contrast filter, which is plastic and attached under the lens -- one of the ones with a round filter in a square holder, which slides into a frame. I looked at it and saw a good bit of dust and such, so I ran some light water over it and dried it carefully with a lint-free cloth, though it seemed still to have some spots and dust on it. I then reprinted the original photo, and found that it still had white dots and spots, but in different places now.

This raises a few questions.

1.) Can this happen? I thereafter googled extensively on polycontrast filters, but could find nothing about dust on them causing such extremely noticeable marks. (I at first thought they might be stars, and I had just forgotten that there were stars that night, but there were no tails, and I found a couple on the ground!). In fact, this is almost the only optical surface in photography that I've ever read of where people do NOT seem very worked up about dust. Is my problem caused by something else?

Another possibility I might mention is that my condensor lens is a little dirty. I should of course clean this, but I don't really suspect it in this case, since I did not move it between shots. Could it cause that, in any case?

2.) Would above-the-film filters cause the same problem? I looked at some Ilford sheet filters that I could get cheap, but they too had quite a few white spots etc. Would defects in them have as egregious an effect?

Thank you for any thoughts you may have. I will post a scan of the print(s) this weekend if necessary.

Incidentally, the first two photos I printed were daylight and had forest, grass, etc. in them, so I could not really tell whether the same effects were present there. They were not printed with a high contrast filter.

Thank you,
Stephen