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Thank you to Alan Bell for telling me about Drummond Young Ltd in the
1960s. Alan wrote:
Edinburgh Photographers
"I stumbled across the EdinPhoto website while
searching for Edinburgh photographers.
I recognised
the name of Rankin Weir
**, as
I had worked with him at Drummond Youngs in the early 1960s."
** Rankin Weir sent a
message to the EdinPhoto web site about the time when he worked for
Campbell Harper
photographers.
Large Prints
"The large prints that Rankin mentions were
mainly for architects but we also had a contract with Scottish Command
(Army) to produce large, 60x40 prints for recruiting campaigns. They
supplied us with 10x8 prints and we copied them onto 5x4 glass plates
using a Statfile horizontal copy camera that ran on rails with a tilting
easel at the opposite end.
Negatives were then placed back in the camera
and projected on to the easel up to 60"x40". Prints were then processed in
butchers' trays, taking about 1 gallon of developer.
The boss, Mr Duncan Drummond Young had
purchased a large quantity of ex RAF dev which would turn your fingernails
brown after a day in the darkroom."
Developing and Printing
"If
the print development was slow in parts, we used a sponge soaked
in warm dev, sponging 'carefully' that part.
Rankin mentions that these prints were fiddly
to handle. To make them easier to handle, we soaked the paper in
water prior to development. |