Your Darkroom

For a darkroom, you need a room that can be perfectly darkened. Neither the windows nor any cracks in the door should allow light to enter. Check this by sitting in the completely dark room for five minutes with bright outside light. If you still do not notice any glimmer of light, the room is sufficiently darkened. If light still penetrates through any cracks, a curtain made of dense black fabric will help.

Your lab should be heatable, maintain a constant temperature, and have both electricity and water. For black and white work, running cold water will suffice in a pinch; for color work, you will definitely need warm water. If you have a mixer tap that allows you to keep running water at a precise and constant temperature, you will have the optimum of what you can ask for. Of course, with the water connection you need a basin. In a pinch, it does a small, simple sink, which allows you to throw away solutions, drain the watering water. Much more practical is a sink, as used in kitchens a sink made of stainless steel with a worktop attached to the side.

Your laboratory space should be well ventilated. In some cases, you will be working at relatively high temperatures, up to 40° C, with chemical baths that evaporate naturally. The air in your darkroom quickly becomes saturated with moisture. And this moisture settles on everything in the lab. Especially when the temperature drops after the work is finished and the air can no longer hold the humidity. This is not good for the equipment, chemicals or papers. Metals rust or corrode, and a milky precipitate forms on glass surfaces. Electrical cables are also affected. And anything that absorbs and releases moisture loses its utility value over time. This applies to the filters on the darkroom lamp as well as to powdered chemical substances that are no longer shrink-wrapped in their original packaging. Above all, however, photographic papers suffer, since their gelatin layer was specifically manufactured to readily absorb moisture = otherwise you could not process them without problems. Unfortunately, the paper also absorbs moisture from the air, releases it again and thus “ages” very quickly. The reproduction quality is negatively affected, and it can even happen that the paper works blotchy.

Even if you can ventilate thoroughly, it is a good idea not to store large supplies of papers and chemicals in the lab itself. A shelf that is at a normal temperature and dry somewhere in a dark corner of the home is much better for this purpose.

In your lab, you need at least two work surfaces that should be separate: One on which your enlarger will stand and on which you will do all the “dry” work from spooling films to cutting paper sizes; and a second for all the wet work of preparing chemicals, developing films and papers, experimenting, and, of course, finally drying the finished images