New to me printing issue

[John Layton]

If you can move the negative so that the portion to which you are referring is placed directly below (or as close as possible to) the optical axis of the enlarging lens, with the aperture set to two or three stops smaller than wide-open, then do a series of test strips of this area - honing in on exposure and contrast...this should tell you something.

When you'd mentioned the fog rolling in...my first thought was light scattering by water droplets in the air. My second thought was that perhaps the branches were moving ever so slightly during the camera exposure. More remote possibility that your use of a diffused (enlarger) light source could be placing the very thin branch areas beyond the exposure threshold of the paper at your settings.

A question: what enlarger lens are you using? Do you know that it is in good condition...collimation-wise? A hunch: Despite Beseler's decision to go with a tilting lens stage to help with "after the fact" corrections of converging verticals, I've never trusted these stages and wish that that Beseler had either made such a stage optional or had done away with it entirely.

[Doremus Scudder]

Later Beseler 45M... models don't have the tilting lens stage. Still, the lens is difficult to align. I have a modified lensboard that consists of two plates. One goes in the regular lens mount on the enlarger, the lens is mounted in the other, which can be positioned by means of three Allen screws. I think Zone VI and others used to market these. I shouldn't be too hard to whip one up for anyone with machinist skills.

Doremus

[Ethan]

If you need one of those alignment adjusting lens boards, the Vermont Center for Photography, where I print, has a whole bunch of lens boards sitting in the store, and I'm fairly certain I saw at least a few of those rattling around in the bins. I'd be happy to check next time I'm there (Wednesday likely) if you'd like.