Sleeping in there with all that ether might be an issue though ! 
Could be the last nap you take.
Could be the last nap you take.
Darkroom portraits
-
A
- Thread starter argentic
- Start date
Recent Classifieds
-
For Sale Nikon 28mm 2.8 ais and 20mm 2.8 ais
- Started by Gram Nylén
-
For Sale FS: Beseler Printmaker 35 lamp housing and partial neg carrier
- Started by dirkfletcher
-
For Sale FS: Nagaoka 4x5 Pinhole Camera
- Started by B.S.Kumar
-
For Sale Sinar Grip & Cable Release for Sinar Handy 4x5 - Hard to Find - EX++++
- Started by pdccamerqs
-
For Sale Mint Nikon AI-s Lenses
- Started by Barlow
Forum statistics
- Status
bill schwab
Advertiser
I know, looks like it will be a tent for me... or maybe the ether!
Very nice, Bill. Will there be a "wet plate shootout" between your trailer and Joe's Magic Bus this year?
Mike
bill schwab
Advertiser
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2008
- Messages
- 1
- Format
- 35mm
Hey all. Wonderful pictures! So many amazing darkrooms out there. If anybody doesn't mind, I've got a question for those of you who may have done this. Is there any easy, or cheap way possible to convert half a room, or half a garage, into a darkroom without building anything that's permanent?
Welcome to APUG, Palundrium. I see this is your first post. All you really need to do is to make the space light proof. There are plenty of different materials you can use - the black plastic sheeting used in gardens, black cloth "gaffer" tape, cardboard, wood. It all just depends on where the light may get in. If you can give some specific details on your needs and the space available, I'm sure we can help.
All you really need to do is to make the space light proof. There are plenty of different materials you can use - the black plastic sheeting used in gardens, black cloth "gaffer" tape, cardboard, wood. It all just depends on where the light may get in. If you can give some specific details on your needs and the space available, I'm sure we can help. 
-
- Richard Lee
- Deleted
I sure like those stainless shelves. What are they?
Ikea dish drains, aren't they?
Aye, sure are 
I'm new to APUG and have really enjoyed this thread Thanks to one and all.
We've recently built a new house, but I still couldn't get a permanent darkroom past the bank manager, so I have to convert the bathroom for each printing session... Here's some before and after pictures.
The D2V is sitting on a microwave trolley that gets wheeled in and out, while the trays are on the vanity/chairs/bog.
Amazing what you can do with sheets, towels, blankets, cardboard, thermodrape and rodinal!
The biggest problem has been light bouncing round inside the roof cavity (from the downlights) and then coming through the penetration for the ceiling fan ...
Fortunately there is another bathroom in the house so wife and kids do not need to "go without" ...
Works for me (sort of).
Cheers
Carey Bird, Sydney, Oz
Thanks to one and all.We've recently built a new house, but I still couldn't get a permanent darkroom past the bank manager, so I have to convert the bathroom for each printing session... Here's some before and after pictures.
The D2V is sitting on a microwave trolley that gets wheeled in and out, while the trays are on the vanity/chairs/bog.
Amazing what you can do with sheets, towels, blankets, cardboard, thermodrape and rodinal!
The biggest problem has been light bouncing round inside the roof cavity (from the downlights) and then coming through the penetration for the ceiling fan ...
Fortunately there is another bathroom in the house so wife and kids do not need to "go without" ...
Works for me (sort of).
Cheers
Carey Bird, Sydney, Oz
Attachments
Welcome to apug BTW. Many millions of prints have been made in bathrooms! You're in good company. But, in the future, maybe you should buy the "bank manager" a nice gift.
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2006
- Messages
- 2
- Format
- 35mm
Great to see the photos...To go along with them wish would love for everyone to let us know the size of the space one's working/"living" in...Thanks for sharing and the a kick in the butt!!!
maybe you should buy the "bank manager" a nice gift.
LOL, I just bought her a new house ... and even that didn't work :-(
Cheers
Carey Bird
Time for an update on my ongoing quest for my own darkroom. My parent purchased an old cold room from a pub, without the motor, to use as a store room for produce from the garden and orchard. I suggested I could use it for a darkroom until I went off to university...well I'm at university and still borrowing it when I come up home. It's not 100% light tight, the door comes off it's runners rather often, and running water (let alone water of a set temperature, hah!) is a lovely dream. I'm getting by though, and the repairs I make to it will help it in it's next, more productive role.
The Ilfolab 2150RC is just a large paperweight until I have somewhere to plum it into...came with the Beseler 4x5 (not pictured, needs a new light source), roll paper cutter, roll print easel (not pictured, #$^&ing huge), and the desk, for a grand total of $320 Australian.
The extraction fan is pretty mean, but my mum worries.
The Ilfolab 2150RC is just a large paperweight until I have somewhere to plum it into...came with the Beseler 4x5 (not pictured, needs a new light source), roll paper cutter, roll print easel (not pictured, #$^&ing huge), and the desk, for a grand total of $320 Australian.
The extraction fan is pretty mean, but my mum worries.
Attachments
Just started getting back into "real" photography after 10 years of shooting pretty much nothing but digital. Not going to hang up my CCD's for everything - but for stuff that matters it's time to setup a darkroom again!
I built my first darkroom in 1988 the summer before I started high school. My father was supposed to help me - but a case of appendicitis sidelined him for the project and I ended to tackling it all myself. I had been saving all the profits from my paper route for two years to finance it and ended up doing everything from framing the walls to wiring and plumbing.
Most of the construction photos are here but here are a few highlights:
Before:
Cleared out:
Framed:
First use:
To be honest this is jumping ahead a little. My first "darkroom" was a box with some black sweatshirt sleeves duct taped onto holes and my bathroom sink. My first prints were done on the floor of my parents closet and processed in trays in the bottom of their shower (their bathroom and closet had the fewest windows and doors to deal with!)
The first print from that improvised setup was from a photo I took the day I started construction on my darkroom, the same day my dad's appendix nearly burst. We had pit passes to the Cleveland Grand Prix - he thought he just had a stomach flu and had my mom take me to the race that day. When we got back we found out he had been rushed to the hospital when things got worse (this was of course before cell phones.) The print is still one of my favorites - I didn't see many big names at the races that day (it was just a practice day) but I did catch one or two:
Over the summer I continued to improve the darkroom. I built a sink out of 3/4" plywood with several layers of paint and polyurethane over it. Brought in some old kitchen cabinets that were collecting dust in our basement, and before I finished the outer drywall added light traps in the walls for ventilation with a built in fan. I modified one of the drawers in the kitchen cabinet to be a paper safe and even added an adjustable shelf off the side of my table for doing bigger prints. Though the limitations of the Beseler cadet meant I never really used it.
(Continued in next post due to photo limit)
I built my first darkroom in 1988 the summer before I started high school. My father was supposed to help me - but a case of appendicitis sidelined him for the project and I ended to tackling it all myself. I had been saving all the profits from my paper route for two years to finance it and ended up doing everything from framing the walls to wiring and plumbing.
Most of the construction photos are here but here are a few highlights:
Before:
Cleared out:
Framed:
First use:
To be honest this is jumping ahead a little. My first "darkroom" was a box with some black sweatshirt sleeves duct taped onto holes and my bathroom sink. My first prints were done on the floor of my parents closet and processed in trays in the bottom of their shower (their bathroom and closet had the fewest windows and doors to deal with!)
The first print from that improvised setup was from a photo I took the day I started construction on my darkroom, the same day my dad's appendix nearly burst. We had pit passes to the Cleveland Grand Prix - he thought he just had a stomach flu and had my mom take me to the race that day. When we got back we found out he had been rushed to the hospital when things got worse (this was of course before cell phones.) The print is still one of my favorites - I didn't see many big names at the races that day (it was just a practice day) but I did catch one or two:
Over the summer I continued to improve the darkroom. I built a sink out of 3/4" plywood with several layers of paint and polyurethane over it. Brought in some old kitchen cabinets that were collecting dust in our basement, and before I finished the outer drywall added light traps in the walls for ventilation with a built in fan. I modified one of the drawers in the kitchen cabinet to be a paper safe and even added an adjustable shelf off the side of my table for doing bigger prints. Though the limitations of the Beseler cadet meant I never really used it.
(Continued in next post due to photo limit)
By the next summer my darkroom was pretty much ready to go. I was deeply involved in our schools photography club at that point. I became head photographer for our school paper and by my senior year was president of the club and head photographer for the yearbook. My darkroom got a lot of use by both myself and other club members when deadline times came around!
I can't find any photos of it...but I actually used liquid light to put a print of a photo of myself working in the darkroom on the door. The image I used for that is the middle one hanging on the wall behind the enlargers:
You can see one of the built in vents under the shelfs in this image of the all important darkroom tunes. I removed all the lights from in the stereo and then plugged the Schlitz beer sign that's on the pegboard into a switched outlet on the back of the stereo. Put a safelight bulb into the beer sign and I had way to remember if I had turned the radio off without fear of fogging paper:
Here's the intake and built in fan for the ventilation. The doorbell switch went to a doorbell inside so people could let me know they wanted in. I also wired a switch upstairs in our pantry that my parents could use to let me know they needed me without having to come down to the basement:
I can't find the later photos...but eventually I traded in the Vivitar and Printmaker enlargers for a used Durst M670. Then shortly after came into possession of an Omega D-II mounted on it's own table and with a full set of condensors, negative carriers and even an omegalite head when our local police department closed down their darkroom and donated everything to the school - who didn't want it either and offered it to me
At some point I picked up a Jobo CPE2 (thankfully my sink was big enough to hold the Jobo AND a set of 8x10 trays at the same time) and taught myself color printing. Tried C-41 a few times but when I turned 16 I got a job at a one hour lab / photo studio and could get C-41 done free (had to pay for prints though.) The owner was blown away that I had learned so much with no formal training and pretty soon I was the main printer there, which I liked since it meant not having to work the counter
I packed up the Jobo and Durst and took them with me to College where I majored in Visual Communications with a specialization in photo illustration (though the school kept trying to push me into photo communication - their name for photojournalism.) I did setup some temporary darkrooms in the various houses I lived in at that time...but with the skills I had taught myself I got a job my freshman year in the photo resources department of the schools college of medicine. It was the best darkroom on campus and a job usually only open to upper classmen. But my portfolio and a friends recommendation sealed it for me. Sadly my junior year my position was cut so they could fund more digital equipment. A move I had been pushing them to make myself, ah sweet irony!
After college I moved out west to Arizona and again had just the essentials. 3 trays, my Jobo, and my Durst. But about that same time I got my first digital camera and other than a few 1-2 night temporary darkroom setups barely touched analog again. With no local camera stores here in Yuma, AZ and mail order only really being safe in the winter it was just too much hassle.
Next post - my analog revival
I can't find any photos of it...but I actually used liquid light to put a print of a photo of myself working in the darkroom on the door. The image I used for that is the middle one hanging on the wall behind the enlargers:
You can see one of the built in vents under the shelfs in this image of the all important darkroom tunes. I removed all the lights from in the stereo and then plugged the Schlitz beer sign that's on the pegboard into a switched outlet on the back of the stereo. Put a safelight bulb into the beer sign and I had way to remember if I had turned the radio off without fear of fogging paper:
Here's the intake and built in fan for the ventilation. The doorbell switch went to a doorbell inside so people could let me know they wanted in. I also wired a switch upstairs in our pantry that my parents could use to let me know they needed me without having to come down to the basement:
I can't find the later photos...but eventually I traded in the Vivitar and Printmaker enlargers for a used Durst M670. Then shortly after came into possession of an Omega D-II mounted on it's own table and with a full set of condensors, negative carriers and even an omegalite head when our local police department closed down their darkroom and donated everything to the school - who didn't want it either and offered it to me
At some point I picked up a Jobo CPE2 (thankfully my sink was big enough to hold the Jobo AND a set of 8x10 trays at the same time) and taught myself color printing. Tried C-41 a few times but when I turned 16 I got a job at a one hour lab / photo studio and could get C-41 done free (had to pay for prints though.) The owner was blown away that I had learned so much with no formal training and pretty soon I was the main printer there, which I liked since it meant not having to work the counter
I packed up the Jobo and Durst and took them with me to College where I majored in Visual Communications with a specialization in photo illustration (though the school kept trying to push me into photo communication - their name for photojournalism.) I did setup some temporary darkrooms in the various houses I lived in at that time...but with the skills I had taught myself I got a job my freshman year in the photo resources department of the schools college of medicine. It was the best darkroom on campus and a job usually only open to upper classmen. But my portfolio and a friends recommendation sealed it for me. Sadly my junior year my position was cut so they could fund more digital equipment. A move I had been pushing them to make myself, ah sweet irony!
After college I moved out west to Arizona and again had just the essentials. 3 trays, my Jobo, and my Durst. But about that same time I got my first digital camera and other than a few 1-2 night temporary darkroom setups barely touched analog again. With no local camera stores here in Yuma, AZ and mail order only really being safe in the winter it was just too much hassle.
Next post - my analog revival
Despite my major in college I ended up no pursuing photography as a living. I found that I really only enjoyed shooting for myself and not for professors, or clients Photography was still a major interest of mine though, and the beauty of the southwest desert constantly called to me. But between the limits of rental housing and the lack of local supplies - and the fact that most of my photos were shared on-line rather than in person...it just made sense to shoot digital. I still yearned for good old Silver Halide and vowed to one day setup a darkroom once again when I owned my own house. Meeting and marrying a woman who also has a love for photography and traditional darkroom practices only made that vow seem all the more likely to come to fruition.
When a local couple opened up a camera store that included a darkroom section - I knew the time had come! I picked up some fresh paper and chemistry that day and went home to start figuring out how we could make a darkroom happen now that we own our own home!
It's far from ideal....and not as specialized as my first darkroom. But it's ours and will only continue to get better now that we're enjoying shooting film again!
Our house has a 3rd bedroom which was an addition and is only accessible through the laundry room. It has only one window (and a dog door) and it's own A/C unit. We have plans to expand the room at some point in the future and those plans now include a bathroom that will have some special features allowing it to double as a darkroom. But for now we have a temporary setup that is functional.
Some aluminum foil and aluminum tape took care of the one window. The doors had almost 2" gaps under them - so a little bit of wood working and a good amount of weather strip was required to get them light tight:
The tiny laundry room had two lights for some reason...which never made sense before. But now works out perfect with one converted into a safelight. I have to finish wiring it - but a bathroom fan was added that exhausts through the water heat closet to an old unused dryer vent:
My durst was setup on an available table (I'd like it higher but my wife prefers working while sitting. Someday I'll make an adjustable table to please us both.)
Dead Link Removed
And a small piece of counter top was installed next to the wash tub to make room for some trays...it's a tight squeeze...and I only had 2 trays so we had to improvise for the stop and wash:
Dead Link Removed
It worked well enough that the next weekend we did some upgrades. A used cabinet was bought at a local thrift shop for $15. We painted it and the laundry room, hung some peg board over the sink, hung a spare timer on the wall and had a much nicer though still cramped setup ready to go:
My wife is a copy editor at the local paper and mentioned our darkroom project in her blog. On a slow news day the paper ended up running it as a story and we've been contacted by some local people with equipment they no longer want. While I still have my D-II back in Ohio in my parents basement...it will be a few years until I drive a U-haul with it and the rest of our old furniture out here. So we picked up a used 23C-II from a local couple.
Oddly though it only had a 6x6 neg carrier and a 50mm lens. So I'm waiting for my old 90mm lens to be shipped from Ohio before I can do much printing.
Since getting back to film I decided I don't want to shoot 35mm much anymore. My wife has an old Rolleicord that used to belong to her grandfather that we've been using, and I have a Lubitel 166 which has managed to surprise me with what it's capable of. I also bought myself a used Bronica ETRS - but it has a problem with the darkslide/shutter interlock so I'm looking for another body now.
It's good to be back and I look forward to becoming a part of the community here!
Photography was still a major interest of mine though, and the beauty of the southwest desert constantly called to me. But between the limits of rental housing and the lack of local supplies - and the fact that most of my photos were shared on-line rather than in person...it just made sense to shoot digital. I still yearned for good old Silver Halide and vowed to one day setup a darkroom once again when I owned my own house. Meeting and marrying a woman who also has a love for photography and traditional darkroom practices only made that vow seem all the more likely to come to fruition.When a local couple opened up a camera store that included a darkroom section - I knew the time had come! I picked up some fresh paper and chemistry that day and went home to start figuring out how we could make a darkroom happen now that we own our own home!
It's far from ideal....and not as specialized as my first darkroom. But it's ours and will only continue to get better now that we're enjoying shooting film again!
Our house has a 3rd bedroom which was an addition and is only accessible through the laundry room. It has only one window (and a dog door) and it's own A/C unit. We have plans to expand the room at some point in the future and those plans now include a bathroom that will have some special features allowing it to double as a darkroom. But for now we have a temporary setup that is functional.
Some aluminum foil and aluminum tape took care of the one window. The doors had almost 2" gaps under them - so a little bit of wood working and a good amount of weather strip was required to get them light tight:
The tiny laundry room had two lights for some reason...which never made sense before. But now works out perfect with one converted into a safelight. I have to finish wiring it - but a bathroom fan was added that exhausts through the water heat closet to an old unused dryer vent:
My durst was setup on an available table (I'd like it higher but my wife prefers working while sitting. Someday I'll make an adjustable table to please us both.)
Dead Link Removed
And a small piece of counter top was installed next to the wash tub to make room for some trays...it's a tight squeeze...and I only had 2 trays so we had to improvise for the stop and wash:
Dead Link Removed
It worked well enough that the next weekend we did some upgrades. A used cabinet was bought at a local thrift shop for $15. We painted it and the laundry room, hung some peg board over the sink, hung a spare timer on the wall and had a much nicer though still cramped setup ready to go:
My wife is a copy editor at the local paper and mentioned our darkroom project in her blog. On a slow news day the paper ended up running it as a story and we've been contacted by some local people with equipment they no longer want. While I still have my D-II back in Ohio in my parents basement...it will be a few years until I drive a U-haul with it and the rest of our old furniture out here. So we picked up a used 23C-II from a local couple.
Oddly though it only had a 6x6 neg carrier and a 50mm lens. So I'm waiting for my old 90mm lens to be shipped from Ohio before I can do much printing.
Since getting back to film I decided I don't want to shoot 35mm much anymore. My wife has an old Rolleicord that used to belong to her grandfather that we've been using, and I have a Lubitel 166 which has managed to surprise me with what it's capable of. I also bought myself a used Bronica ETRS - but it has a problem with the darkslide/shutter interlock so I'm looking for another body now.
It's good to be back and I look forward to becoming a part of the community here!
Last edited by a moderator:
Heres mine: the Darkroom Formerly Known as Bathroom : Taken over by the Axis of Analog in Jan 2008.
Michel Hardy-Vallée
Membership Council
By the way, in case you missed it, Aperture #188 had a whole set of darkroom photographs by Québec photographer Michel Campeau. There was an intro by Martin Parr. Worth watching. I also saw the exhibit in Montréal and had a chance to chat with the photographer.
WOW Now THAT is an enlarger. How does she handle on the road ?
- Status
| Photrio.com contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links. To read our full affiliate disclosure statement please click Here. |
PHOTRIO PARTNERS EQUALLY FUNDING OUR COMMUNITY:  |