Dark room

Dark Room Photography Part 4

Yesterday was my fourth lesson in learning about dark room black and white photography. I was quite excited because I knew this lesson would involve making an enlargement of one of my negatives. I had already decided on the negative I wanted to initially try which was a picture I had taken of one of my cats who is a Silver Tabby using my circular fisheye lens which was attached to a 28mm lens on my Pentax K1000. I liked the fact this picture had my shadow in it and the white walls and patterned tiles in my garden also made the picture more interesting. First of all I had to make a sample sheet once I had decided on the size of the enlargement. In this lesson I unfortunately picked an enlarger with a temperamental digital timer so if pressed slightly wrong, the image wouldn’t expose for the full second which was annoying. I set my first sample sheet

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Dark Room Photography Part 1

When I was a teenager, I was fortunate enough to have a friend who’s parents had a dark room in the basement of their house. The enlarger was from around the 1960s and was all chrome and dome shaped which looked really cool. The dryer was a rack with a cream canvas which was discoloured due to it’s age and the chemicals it had been covered with. I have fond memories of spending hours down there with my friend developing black and white photographs we had taken. Her parents had shown her how it all worked and in turn, she taught me the developing process which I found great fun at the time. Now I’m rediscovering film photography again, I really wanted to get back into a dark room to see how much I could remember of what I’d learnt many years ago and also if I still enjoyed the developing process. I found an adult education course in black

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