Darkroom Prints - Family and Brighton Photographs

Continuing my theme of the past and war time experiences I took some photos with my SLR that follow my theme. These are photographs are of family members and shots from a visit to Brighton. I experimented with different sized paper to see what the prints came out like.  

For the photographs of members of my family I tried to think of ways in which I can make the images look aged. I took photographs of old photos in albums that I have, to achieve an old look on the photographs I set up a tripod with the camera on, then arranged the photographs so that they were in focus under the camera. I took the pictures with a sheet of plastic over thew images so that the natural lighting would reflect off plastic and show up on the negatives. This created a darkened effect over the detail in the image and removed some of the contrast which is what I was hoping for. I used half a piece of 7x5 paper and a quarter of 7x5 paper. I prefer the smaller prints on the quarter of 7x5 because I think that they look more like how photographs would have been printed in the past because printing was expensive they were often printed on small pieces of photographic paper. 

These images are of my trip to brighton. I tried just to focus on things that didn't look modern, for example the lamp post and the pier. However with the shot of the deck chairs I couldn't crop out the people sitting on the beach. As it was a very sunny day this made the print have good contrast. With the first print of the  lamp post it came out a little too dark so I reduced the time the image was exposed for which resulted in a god contrast print.