How to build a darkroom for £100 or less

I can only chime in with everyone else so far: being able to turn a bathroom into a darkroom is one of the finest privileges there are. Due to living situations I cannot anymore, but I really miss having the opportunity to just take an evening and get a print or two out of it. Watching it develop under the safelight is as close as I've ever gotten to magic.

Edit: by the way, if you have older relatives, make sure to ask around if anyone already has an enlarger. They are big machines that normally just collect dust these days, so most people are happy to give them to you. (I made the mistake of buying one on EBay for non-trivial money, shipping and delivery was a big hassle, and two weeks later three different people had offered me theirs for free.)

As an amateur and untalented photographer, my results have benefited a lot from being able to shoot hundreds of photos and maybe get a single composition I'm proud of. Exposure, contrast etc has always been flexible to a point.

However, I really miss my bedroom darkroom from when I was 16-19.

Sheets pegged over the window, rags taped roughly over the door edges. Good enough for B&W print with a red dull light, but still had to load my rolls inside a hot and sweaty duvet cover because otherwise the negatives would get clouded in my ghetto setup. A £20 used enlarger bought from the local classifieds, a rough bench built with planks and rough-cut legs, nails and glue.

Got some great prints. Not many. Miss those days. I still have my Olympus OM2SP, best Camera I have ever used.

There's something to be said for knowing you only have a limited number of shots, and using another roll will cost money and real effort to develop. Makes you stop and think, in my opinion.

On the flip side, my entire "career" with 35mm I got 4 prints that I still love uncritically. My digital career has given me about 50 that I am happy to pay to have printed and put on the wall.

I'm glad that film/print has seen a resurgence in recent years. For a while it was hard (expensive) to get decent supplies. This is a nice ad-hoc setup. Darkroom equipment is definitely like a gas; I think my enlarger timer was around $100 alone.

I have a full darkroom packed away, but just don't have the time/space for it. I miss it. There's something very special about seeing images appear.

I find some darkroom edit methods like burning/dodging more time efficient vs software like Lightroom (much faster to 'mask' with your hand in many cases). But dealing with spot removal -- no contest I'd rather just do that digitally. I don't miss trying to paint chemicals on a negative :)

If getting started, I suggest a class or some good end to end books. Knowing the basic principles is quite helpful (digital or not). You'll also learn a lot about the decisions (+debugging) that ensue. Example -- RC vs fiber paper, properly winding your film onto the dev reel (done by touch), over/under agitating, weak/old chemicals, under fixing, washing, etc.

The more right you get it in camera, the easier time you will have in the darkroom. On average, large sensor digital cameras can be more forgiving than film. That said, there are tricks to fix your mistakes or work around limitations (e.g. pushing/pulling film, printing contrast filters, dodging/burning, exposing multiple frames onto single print, etc.).

If you don't print a lot, a vacuum or accordion container will help preserve your chemicals' life span. Your paper usually likes a cool/steady temp; too hot and it can get fogged. Check your city/county on how to properly dispose of the spent chemicals; usually they don't want spent developer or fixer down the drain.

Darkroom printer here. This is one of my joys in life. Dumped all my digital cameras because printing my photographs gets me off the computer and the tangibility solidifies the work as important for me.

You can actually get away with printing without all of this equipment just to give it a try. I used to print 4x5 contact prints with nothing more than the light in the bathroom and a piece of photo paper.

To this day there remains nothing more magical to me then seeing the silver in the developer slowly produce an image on a page. Happy printing to anyone starting out.

Edit: Also of note that depending on your volume if you develop and print at home it can actually be cheaper than chasing the latest sensor every few years. I just barely crest what it would cost me with sensor upgrades to 2 bodies every few years this way because I am a pretty low volume shooter (2-300 rolls of HP5 a year).

For those who shoot 4x5 (or larger), it's reasonably simple to use a view camera as an enlarger. In a weekend, I built a mount to hold a negative and a light in place of the usual graflok back. Primary materials were laser-cut wood, RGB LED strips, and diffusion paper. I built an Arduino-based controller for use as a variable contrast timer (changing the blue/green mix on the LED strips when printing). The whole rig was about the cost of a good set of contrast filters and took 15 hours of my time.

The back holds the negative on the camera, which I put on an old aluminum tripod and point straight down in a blacked-out bathroom. I develop through a 150mm Nikkor W 4x5 lens; held open. Since I use the timer for timing and never touch the camera/enlarger while exposing the print, the setup is rock-solid and vibration-free.

> If you don’t have a ticking clock, you can even play a ticking soundtrack on your phone – just keep the screen facing down.

Or you can just buy a metronome, or get a free metronome for your phone. Set it to 60 or 120 BPM. I use a metronome and a footswitch. The hard part is remembering to count from zero, instead of one.

I love working in the darkroom, but I’ve sworn off 35mm and haven’t touched it in years.

There is an immense body of knowledge associated with darkroom work. If you are interested, it’s not too hard to find people who will share all their techniques. Everything from tips on how to most quickly find the correct exposure and contrast, to chemical techniques for preserving prints in an archival way.

Film gets a bad rap for being slow and

You could call me a serious amateur and I have done two very cheap set ups similar to what the article describes.

First Setup: Windowless bathroom

What I learned from this is that you need a really rock solid bench or counter to put your enlarger on or very small vibrations from focusing or triggering the timer might cause blur in the printed image. Monorail designs like the one in the article are very prone to this already.

Second setup: A basement

I went to an art supply store with a flashlight and inspected each piece of cardboard they sold until I found one that the light did not shine through (Elemer's, I think). I cut these to the size of my windows and then used electrical tape to make a light tight seal. Electrical tape is just terrible for this but it blocks the light. I had a nice bench for the enlarger and a table for the trays. There was a utility sink already installed that I used to rinse my prints and film. This was way better than a bathroom, but it was not dark enough to change film because of the pilot light on the hot water heater.

Future:

My plans are on hold at the moment, however, I now have a basement with a great room for a dark room with nearby access to water and sewer. I'm planning to go the whole nine yards this time and install a dark room sink plus dedicated lighting and ventilation. Not exactly a $100 project though.

Seek out your local public darkrooms! (private is okay too)

Printing is a craft, and practicing with others is a great way to get better, have fun, make new friends, all that good stuff!

In San Francisco, we are blessed to have Harvey Milk Photo Center (harveymilkphotocenter.org), one of the largest public darkrooms in the world. Once this is all over, drop by and make some prints!

(feel free to shoot me a line! i am a long time member there but otherwise not affiliated)

The english term darkroom is solely used in a sexual context in Germany [1]. If you read the comments coming from that perspective some really become awkwardly funny...

[1]https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkroom

If my local makerspace had a darkroom, I would be significantly more inclined to join.