Into the darkness

Into the darkness

If you’ve been following this blog for the last few days, you’ll know that yesterday’s blog – about scanning negatives – is my Option B: the real way to do it is to get into the darkroom and make prints on old-fashioned silver-rich printing paper. And you may be wondering why this post isn’t taking you into the darkroom and showing you the wonders of printing. (And they are wonders, truly: the peak experience of my photography is watching an image form in front of my eyes on a sheet of white paper…)

On a practical level, I’ve been neglecting my darkroom, and so I’m having to tidy things up a good deal to give myself access to the wet bench and the enlarger. I’m nearly there: today should see prints happen.

On a theoretical level, though, it may be a good time to backtrack and explain film, and paper. It starts like this: some compounds of silver are sensitive to light, and if light strikes them, they change subtly. Exposing the film they’re coated on to the right chemical afterwards allows that chemical to reduce the silver compound to metallic silver, which is black (like that tarnished silver spoon granny gave you as a Christening present). Bathing the film in another chemical dissolves away the remaining silver compound, leaving a black image where the light struck the film. In other words a negative – dark where the original was light, and light where it was dark.

If you then put the film in contact with paper coated with similar silver salts, and expose the whole lot to light, you form a positive image on the paper, which you can develop in the same way.

But with modern film, a same-size print will be disappointing – an inch by an inch and a half. So you will probably want to make a bigger print – an enlargement, in the jargon.

You do this by holding the negative in front of a light, and focussing an image of the negative onto a piece of paper. The working parts of my enlarger aren’t terribly obvious, so the picture of it is accompanied by a sketch of the operational bits.




You easily build up a whole series of ‘indispensable’ accessories – a focus magnifier, to allow you to focus the image accurately; an easel, to hold the paper flat, in precisely the position you want, a special large sink to allow you to have all the necessary dishes of chemical easily to hand, a print washer to help remove all the fixer from the paper. But in essence, you can do it all in a darkened room, without running water. I managed in my college room at university, and in my bedroom: even on my Mum’s dining room table.

Tomorrow, we’ll go into the darkroom and switch off the light, leaving only the safelight – an orange or red light that allows you to see (almost), but which doesn’t affect the printing paper. While many decades of effort have gone into making film sensitive to all wavelengths of light, for a natural-looking image, black and white printing paper is sensitive only to blue light (I generalise, a bit!)

And later today, I’ll find out if I can take digital images by safelight…