Dev Blog, Darkroom and Contact Printing

The De Vere 504 Enlarger that I used to make the Contact prints

Following shooting and developing the rolls of film I had used to shoot my project on, I was curious to see if I could get in a little darkroom work as another process and experiment into more established photographic work that I was working towards as a side goal with the project.

Having had a total of zero hours in the darkroom, the prospect seemed daunting and confusing. I spoke with some fellow coursemates and was very kindly offered some tuition in contact printmaking the following day. I accepted the offer and met them in the darkroom and we got to work.

There were some very new concepts to get my head around, namely the inversion of the exposure rule, usually being too bright = smaller aperture/ less light to get a correct exposure but with darkroom printing, it’s too bright = wider aperture/ more light to get correct exposure. This was easier to get a grip with when we started making test strips with graduated exposure levels.

Aligning the negatives on the photo paper too was a challenge as fitting an entire strip of 120 film onto the 10×8 surface without overlap or edges off the edge. Using a specially made holder was beneficial to this and pressed the negatives down with a glass lid ready for exposure.

using the test strips to determine a correct exposure, we blasted the sheet with light and then placed them in the dev chemical tray and sloshed the solution over the paper, slowly images began to fade in on the paper. many of my prints came out quite dark as I was still getting used to the precise timings with both the exposure and the dev time in the chemical.

some of my contact prints in the wash stage

However I was pleased with what I had produced and felt much more confident in my ability to now work and produce at least something in the darkroom whereas before I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. This has only spurred me on to work more in the darkroom and hopefully go on to producing some fine prints in the new year.

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