2026-10-30
Split-grade printing means giving the paper one exposure through a soft filter for the highlights and a second through a hard filter for the shadows. Most guides now assume a phone app with a beeping countdown. My enlarger timer died in the spring, and I did not want a glowing screen in the darkroom.
The workaround is embarrassingly analogue: a mechanical metronome set to 60. I count the soft exposure aloud, swap the filter, count the hard one. It is accurate enough for test strips in whole seconds, and it turns out I make fewer mistakes when I am counting rather than watching.
Burning in small areas. With two hands busy holding a card, counting clicks becomes a juggling act. For those prints I still write the plan on a scrap of paper first: soft 8, hard 11, burn top-left corner hard +4.