My whole life is a darkroom.

Between University and work I felt my brain was overloaded this week. I was really looking forward to a welcome distraction from squinting at computer screens. Being in the darkroom gave me an opportunity to slow down and focus on something more tactile and analogue.

Week three’s content included a run down of the darkroom equipment and chemistry, how to carry out test sheets to work out what the best exposure settings are for printing, and finally printing our first contact sheet.

Many moons ago I had a brief stint of studying photography at college, so I found that using the enlarger and the development process etc felt familiar.

However, I also very quickly remembered that I used to be quite terrible back then for working out the best settings for exposing my prints, predominantly due to my tendency to get anxious and impatient then start changing multiple settings at the same time.

Luckily our instructor for this course has the patience of a saint and me being older (if not altogether wiser) I was able to slow down and take my time a little more.

Having failed miserably to develop my own negs the previous week (whoops!), I was working with some old Kentmere 400 negatives shot with my Chinon CM4-S on a rather dull winters day walk a few years ago.

Test strip 1: f5.6 5 - 30 seconds

Test strip 2: f8 5-30 seconds

My first test sheet was a tad overexposed but stopping down the aperture yielded better results and I settled on f8 at 22 seconds for my contact sheet.

Next week will cover how to make enlargements from our negatives in order to create our first 8x10 prints.

I’ll likely pick a shot from these negs to print from, but I’m going to attempt to develop another roll over the weekend so we’ll see what happens!