But the good news is, like a gas, a darkroom can also be compressed. In the 1970s and 80s, many darkrooms were built in garages and basements, but that’s a luxury which those of us who live in small, rented flats can rarely afford. We’ve got this! A darkroom is like a gasĪ darkroom is like a gas – it expands to fill the space available. By comparison, a 21st-century flat sounds like a cakewalk. And in the 1850s, Nadar, satirically portrayed in the lithograph above, developed collodion wet-plates in mid-air while soaring above Paris in a hot-air balloon. In the early 1900s, Frank Hurley, official photographer for the Shackleton expedition, set up a darkroom in an Antarctic hut. The further back you go, the crazier it gets. Honoré Daumier (1863, Wikimedia Commons, public domain) Nadar élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l’Art (Nadar elevating Photography to Art). He would darken the room, and stand there and expose a big stack of prints, then take them down to the darkroom in the art department at the university and develop them in the communal trays, in which lots of students were doing their work at the same time. I went to Garry’s apartment, which was small and dark, and I was astonished to find his enlarger crammed into an alcove in the second bedroom, between the bed and the wall. In The Education of a Photographer, Leo Rubinfien describes visiting Garry Winogrand in the 1970s: A Guardian article advised:ĭon’t bother with home wet printing unless you have the space to create a ‘proper’ darkroom … Any attempt to produce photographs in your bathroom or kitchen is sure to end in domestic disharmony.īut it doesn’t have to be this way. Author after author described elaborate and expansive layouts, with floorplans to match – a ‘wet side’ and a ‘dry side’, expensive light-proofing, dedicated plumbing and ventilation, equipment lists running to several pages. I found them informative, but also intimidating. When I was starting out, I read a lot of books and articles on how to set up a darkroom. I suppose Printing for people with limited resources who may or may not be millennials but who have an interest in analogue printing would be more accurate, but somehow it’s less catchy as a title. In short, Part 1 is mostly for people in the two blue areas of this Venn diagram: People, perhaps, with lifestyle and career choices which entail frequently moving flats, or even countries. People with limited space, living in rented flats. What I mean is printing for people like me, that is, people who are willing to spend a little money on the hobby, but not a lot. I use millennials as shorthand, of course. So let’s get started on Part 1, also known as… Printing for millennials And I’ll focus on 35mm, although some of what I say here also applies to medium- and large-format.īut first, we need a darkroom. All five parts focus on traditional black-and-white printing on silver gelatine paper I won’t go into colour printing or alternative processes. Finally, in Parts 3, 4 and 5, I’ll cover some intermediate techniques including geometric timing, localised test strips, split grade printing and local manipulations (dodging and burning). In Part 2, I’ll try to show that basic printing is not difficult either, and so much fun that it should probably be illegal.

In this, the first of a five-part series on printing black-and-white photographs in a darkroom, I want to illustrate just how cheap it can be – how, through a combination of eBay deals and some dubious hacks, I built a makeshift but fully-functional darkroom in a small flat for a grand total of £92.50… and how you can too (clickbaity but true!) In fact, it turns out that setting up a basic darkroom need not be expensive. What took me so long? Two misconceptions, mainly – that it’s expensive, and that it’s difficult. But I started darkroom printing just a year and a half ago, in autumn 2018.

I’ve been shooting film since the late 90s my father bought me a quirky little National 35 when I was thirteen.

Darkroom supplies near me