It's complete!

[ChrisC]

After a month of slogging away over weekends, I finally put the finishing touches to my darkroom last night.

It's only really small (Just under 2m x just under 1.5m), and it's without a sink, but I mainly wanted it to do printing rather than developing. My laundry is less than 5 paces from the door, so when it comes to developing film, I can either load it into the tank in my darkroom or changing bag, then move the chemicals and tank to my laundry sink and work from there, like I've been doing for the last couple of months. It's a pretty simple set up, but it should be more than enough to last me for quite a while.

Now I can finally get my weekends back to take some photos!

Any thoughts/suggestions for improvement? This is my first darkroom, so I'm still changing the placement of things looking for the most user friendly layout of everything.

 

[galyons]

Congratulations Cris!
Looks like you used the available space well. Let us know how it works for you!!

Cheers,
Geary

 

[TPPhotog]

My congratulations also Chris. Now my suggestion is you package it up and send it over here, after all you have the experience to build another now OK if you don't fancy that idea have loads of fun printing and I'm looking forward to your postings from the virgin darkroom.

 

[BWGirl]

Hey Chris!
I have a couple suggestions for you, but first, Congratulations!!! I also have a waterless darkroom and it has not slowed me down at all. Here are my suggestions:

First, you want to move those trays away from your enlarger as far as you can. You may even want to put some sort of temporary wall up between them. All it takes is once of having a nice fresh stack of paper ruined by splashed fixer or developer to see why darkrooms traditionally do not allow wet and dry areas to 'fraternize'! I can see that you really do not have the room to move them entirely away, but even if you could move them farther away and put up a barricade it would be fine.

Next...this is my own special trick I will share with you ! You know that you will have to 'agitate' the developer, right. Well, it's really hard to 'rock' the trays on a flat surface, soooooooo I took a beach towel and folded it in 1/3s so it's skinny and long. I put that under my trays. It makes it really easy to rock them, but it's also wide enough that the trays won't tip & spill.

I only see 3 trays. I assume you will have a bucket somewhere with water in it as a holding tank til you rinse the prints?? If so, make sure you put it somewhere you won't be tripping over it!

And, my last bit of advice is to have tons of fun!!!!

 

[oriecat]

Great job! Now get to printing!

 

[ChrisC]

Thanks alot for all the comments so far everyone!


Jeanette, that towel idea sounds like a beauty, I'll definatly have to give it a go! As for moving the trays away, I had kind of thought of that but I wasn't sure. I do have a fairly cheap but effective paper safe that I'll be using, so the chances of developer splashing over them would be minimal, but I've got the room to move all three trays about 3/4 of a tray-width away, so I'll do that too just to be on the safe side. As you can see in the first photo in the bottom right corner I have a couple of new house paint buckets that I picked up for a couple of bucks at the local paint shop with the intentions of using them as holding tanks, but thanks for mentioning it!

 

[joeyk49]

Is that carpet in your darkroom???? Talk about creature comforts...well I guess if your going to stand awhile, you may as well be confortable...My arches are already trying to convince me to do it too..

 

[ChrisC]

Is that carpet in your darkroom???? Talk about creature comforts...well I guess if your going to stand awhile, you may as well be confortable...My arches are already trying to convince me to do it too..

It's basically grey astro-turf. It cost about $10 a meter, and I only needed 2m so I thought I might as well splash out. It does make a big difference under foot though, and I can go in there with bare feet in comfort too. I would imagine it would be a little more dust friendly than normal carpet too, but I guess time will tell there.