Darkroom Work

This morning we spent a few hours in the darkroom developing our films into contact sheets. As I have never used a darkroom before today I was quite intruiged into what we were going to be doing.

To start off with we had a health and safety talk so that we could work without being in danger and without putting others in danger. This included things like not taking food or drink into the darkrooms, not using phones or light as it could be an expensive mistake and keeping bags under desks so nobody trips in the dark conditions. After going through all of the risks and procedures I had to go and collect all of the equipment I would need from the resources centre.

We we given a kit list which included a tray, a set of tongs, lens, a negative board for the enlarger, 35mm insert and a contact sheet board. After collecting this we were ready to start developing the film.

To start we made up each of the solutions; developer, stop and fix. The developer had to be 1:9 which meant that as the trays hold 2l it would need to be 200ml developer and 1800ml water. This was the same ratio for the fix. The stop had to be 1:19 which was 100ml stop and 1900ml water. Next we set the enlarger to 10 seconds and focused it so that when we put the images film below to test exposure we would have a good time scale. We put the negatives into the contact sheet carrier and set up the negative inserts and lens. We then placed the carrier with the film and photographics paper inside underneath the enlarger, holding a book halfway over the strip so that it would only expose a small amount to the paper. (We had to be very careful with the paper making sure there was no light which could fog it and ruin it) We went along the line adding 10 seconds each time. We then took the paper with the tongs and put it into the solution of developer. It stayed in there for 1 minute and a half (moving it around every 10 seconds or so. It was then moved to the stop for 30 seconds, followed by the fix for 5 minutes. When we completed the fix we could briefly take it outside to normal light to see if they looked okay. This was all then followed by a water wash for 10 minutes. Once we completed the first tester we had a rough idea of how many seconds to have it exposed for when creating the full contact sheet. It wass between 30 and 40 seconds. To make sure of what we wanted, we completed a second tester. After this we finally came to the decision of exposing it for 30 seconds.