Ian showed us the equipment, chemicals and processes required for developing our photographs. At a glance, the process is complicated but we took to it fairly quickly and after a few misfires to begin with, the majority of photographic prints coming out were of a good standard.
The process:
When the negatives are developed, the chosen image is to be placed into the englarger machine in the dark room. By this point, the only light to be allowed in the room is to be filtered to remove all blue light, which reacts with the light-sensitive paper used for producing the prints. The red spectrum does not react, so there is a low level of ambient light that can be used to operate in. Health and safety concerns are important, however, as the room is still dark (as the name implies) and so personal items must be stowed away and people must be extra careful to be aware of those around them.
There is a slide tray in the enlarger that can be removed and have negatives placed onto. This is easier to do in stronger light conditions so it may be wise to do this placement outside of the dark room. Once the negative is in place, the tray is placed back into the enlarger machine. Attached to the machine is a timer device that allows exposure to be timed in increments of 1 second, with a minimum of 10 seconds. There is also an override function which enables the exposure lamp to be switched on indefinitely, which is used also for setting the focus and size of the projected image from the negative. The negative itself is literally a negative image, black is white and vice versa. The enlarger machine, through a combination of mirrors, projects the image down onto a guiding board, which has adjustable rulers for creating blocked areas safe from exposure, useful for creating borders on photographic prints.
Once the image is focussed and in the correct proportion for the size of photo paper being used (today, we used A6 pieces), the light is turned off and the photo paper is placed where the projection landed. This is difficult to perfect in the low light conditions, and absolutely no natural light must come into contact with the print at this stage, or it will ruin it. The first stage of photographic printing is to establish the appropriate exposure level, by creating a test print. The whole image is exposed for 10 seconds, and gradually the image is covered over by card to protect parts of the paper from exposure, whilst the remaining section of the paper is exposed to light again for another 10 seconds. This means that part of the print is exposed for 10 seconds, and another for 20 seconds. This goes on another three or four times until there is a range of exposure levels (10, 20, 30, 40 seconds etc).
Once this is done, the image is taken to the developing area, which contains three trays of different chemicals. The photo paper is placed into the developer tray, which will react with the silver in the paper and will gradually reveal the contents of the print. This process should take around 2 minutes to complete, and any longer can over-develop the image. Once the image has developed enough, the paper is taken out and placed into the next tray, which is one of two trays used for 'fixing' the image. The fixer in this tray is acidic, and help to seal the photo paper so light will not affect it and the image will not react any further. This stage lasts 30 seconds, and then the image is placed into the second fixer tray, which contains an alkali liquid which neutralises the acidity of the previous tray. The photopaper must remain in this tray for around 5 minutes, before being transferred to a cold water basin, which contains running water that does not allow chemicals to collect. After another 5 minutes, the photopaper is finished developing and can be dried in a rolling heater-press. The quality of the photograph will be determinable as soon as it is out of the darkroom and in the water tank, but the chemicals should be removed as much as possible before the photograph is handled.
Depending on personal taste, and artistic intentions with the photograph itself, different levels of exposure will be more appropriate than others, and for future prints the exposure timer is adjusted accordingly. There are a number of small adjustments that can be made on the enlarger machine, and in low light conditions it can be quite difficult to be precise, particularly on a smaller scale of A6. There is a great deal of trial and error involved.
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| Left is the follow on image from the image on the right, the test print. I used paper instead of card, which did quite work for testing the exposure, but did result in some unusual artefacts in the image. |
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| The camera was placed very close to a table outside, focussing in on a small piece of litter that was stuck in to a gap in the woodwork. The below image is underexposed but also interesting. Damage to the paper resulted unfortunately as it stuck to other pieces of photopaper when I took it home. |
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| The left image is framed as it should be is at such a level of exposure as to give the light coming from the ceiling considerable presence, as well as showing the reflections in the wood panelling on the wall. The right image was made before the left image, an similarly to the previous print, the photopaper stuck to another sheet and caused damage when I separated them. Fortunately this wasn't my preferred image of the two, as I had not framed it well when exposing it. |
