The Darkroom 1/8/15

I got to go into the darkroom! New College of Florida's darkroom is small, dark, and hidden. Many students don't realize there's a darkroom and even fewer know that it gives out free film and paper. The TA of the darkroom is a fourth year named Andrew Fiorillo who has taken my ISP as a good distraction from his thesis. He showed me around the "darkroom" and the "darkroom proper", the first of which has normal lighting where you can put your chemicals for negatives in light-safe containers, look at the negatives, dry the negatives, and dry the prints.

Andrew had already taken a roll of film and developed the negatives and was ready to print when we met so I got to learn the printing process. The negatives were in the first room that we entered in a metal cabinet that allowed the negatives to stay in a cool, dry, and most important safe space. We stood around and ate cookie dough treats for a while, while we chatted about the safety and location of all the different supplies in the main room. After I figured out that the labels generally corresponded to the content of the drawer I had to go one through one last thing before I was allowed to get added to the list of people who could check out the key from the cop shop (what students call the campus police): promise NEVER to drink the chemicals in the rooms. It was tough but I managed to make that promise.

Negative drier.

Photo drier

The cabinets got a little cramped so people started to improvise. 

After that we headed into the "darkroom proper." Going into the darkroom was like going into a secret dark red and black world. It was also freezing cold. In the center of the room was a large table that looked like a sink was attached with 3 main trays labeled "developer", "stop bath", and "fixer". The edges of the rooms were lined with metal cabinets that you might imagine show up at the morgue that were all carefully labeled. In addition, there were also six stations with large complicated looking apparatuses that had a lot of rotating pieces that I assumed were used for some kind of focusing.

We took the negatives over to the far back, left corner with the negatives cut into groups of 5 and placed into a plastic holder that kept the negatives organized. There was a foam square with a glass piece that fitted over it and what looked to be a giant microscope hovering over the station. We took out one strip of negatives and sandwiched it into two ping pong shaped paddle pieces. One side of the holder had a small square cut in one side that was the exact size of one picture on the negative strip. Then we inserted the paddle into the microscope apparatus and flipped a switch so that we could see the picture reflected onto the pane of glass. By adjusting the brightness of the light and the height at which the device was positioned we were able bring the reflection into sharp focus. To make sure that it was truly in focus we did another check using a focus strip and a small magnifier and kept adjusting the knobs until what we saw through the small magnifier was a very crisp black line and a grainy background. When we finally got all of the adjustments we took the negative back out and put it into the plastic protector. The next step was to pick a filter out of the drawer that would make give a little bit of contrast. These Ilford Multigrade filters are scaled from 00 to 5 in steps of 1/2 with the lowest number corresponding to the lightest contrast. We used #2 filter. We stuck the filter into the developing device and turned the light timer to 11. We then placed a sheet of paper on the foam, laid the plastic sleeve of the negatives on top, and flipped the switch. Finally, for eleven seconds a pinkish white light shone onto the sleeve and just like that switched back off. We removed the paper from the foam plate and moved over to the three bins of chemicals.

The first tub we put the paper into was developer and that was for 90 seconds. After that, we moved the paper to the stop bath for 30 seconds and then lastly to the fixer for 5 minutes. After the paper makes its rounds it gets put in this tank of water that keeps an even flow of water over the entire paper to remove the residual chemicals. and just like that, there's a black and white picture of all of our negatives right there in front of you!

It was almost like magic but I know there's a special science behind it and that's the next step of the process after I get some pictures taken of course!