Jonathan's blog

Last year I wrote about the darkroom I had set up in my loft. Since then I’ve moved house, so I need to build the darkroom again. This time I have a windowless utility room on the ground floor, with running water and a worktop, so it’s already better than what I had before. Here’s how I’ve set it up.

Click for a larger version, and see below for a bit more explanation. Apologies for the poor quality of this picture – I used my phone as my DSLR is currently tied up in a laser lab at Bristol university’s chemistry department. Hopefully photos to follow!

1. Safelight. This is a very old Paterson safelight, emitting just a dim red glow. Note that this is only suitable for black & white paper – all films must still be handled in total darkness.
2. Liquid concentrates – Various Ilford products, (including Multigrade developer, Ilfostop and Ilfotol), Rollei Digibase C41 chemicals and a bottle of Agfa Viradon New sepia toner.
3. Powdered concentrates – At the moment, just Ilford Microphen. Usually I would choose to use ID-11, but someone gave me 15 litres  of Microphen powder, so who am I to complain!
4. Universal film tanks. These are Paterson tanks and can take 35mm, 120 or 127 film.
5. Graduates, or as most people call them, measuring cylinders. I don’t know why the photography word is different. I also have some funnels for getting stuff back into bottles and some measuring jugs.
6. B&W film chemistry, diluted and ready for use in processing black & white films.
7. Gloves. Developer is quite alkaline and can make your hands sore if you handle it too much. Wearing gloves also helps prevent getting fingerprints on the film.
8. Colour C41 film chemistry – in this case, Rollei Digibase C41. It is diluted and ready for use.
9. Paper squeegee for getting most of the water off finished prints.
10. Film squeegee for getting most of the water off processed negatives. Seems that most people are divided on squeegees for film – they avoid water drying marks, but can cause scratches. Always clean your squeegee!
11. Scissors for cutting film up.
12. Pop-up drying rack for hanging prints over the sink to drip dry.
13. Rinsing tray. This is a normal paper tray, but I made some holes at one end so water trickles in from the tap, over the prints, out of the holes and down the drain. It’s an effective way of washing prints and saves buying an expensive print washer.
14. Paper processing trays for developing, stopping and fixing prints. There are extra trays in the cupboard under the sink for occasions where I also want to tone prints. I also have other sizes.
15. Paper easel. This one is a Durst 8×10″ but there is plenty of room for a larger easel on the baseboard.
16. Dust blower for getting dust off negatives before printing from them. It’s a Giottos Rocket Blower, and works well.
17. Focus finder for inspecting the magnified grain in the negative before printing.
18. Warm water bath. C41 colour processing must be done at 38°C, so I fill this wallpaper pasting trough with warm water and place the bottles of chemicals and the film tanks in it.
19. Thermometers & pencils, also some stirring rods. The thermometers are used to check temperatures of chemicals (20°C for black & white, 38°C for colour). The pencils are essential for making notes about the prints I make, so I can make more copies the same way in the future.
20. Enlarger. Mine is an LPL C7700 medium format enlarger, and can make prints from negatives as large as 6×7cm. I have 50mm and 75mm lenses for 35mm and 120-format negatives.
21. Work light, because sometimes you need to see what you’re doing

Not pictured:

• A clock that ticks loudly so I can time things in the dark
• A room thermometer so I can estimate how warm the chemicals on the shelves might be without having to check.
• A place to hang films to dry. A 36-exposure film is about six feet long, and obviously won’t fit on my print drying rack above the sink!

Most of the photography-specific equipment was purchased either from FirstCall Photographic or second-hand from eBay. Most of the more generic fixtures and fittings were bought from Ikea or other DIY shops.

If you are a darkroom enthusiast, buy Ilford film, paper and chemistry! It might not be the cheapest brand but it’s probably the best and it’s good to support a British company. Too many traditional photographic companies have discontinued products, changed focus or shut down entirely. Support traditional photography, and buy more film!

I decided to have a quick count of the film I have in stock.

Film

It seems I have 37 rolls of 120-format film, and 10 rolls of 135 (35mm) format. That’s a total of 730 pictures, assuming I shoot the 120 film as 6×7 negatives with 10 frames per roll, and the 135 film with 36 frames per roll. That’s getting on for around £200 worth.

For comparison I’ve also included a tiny 8GB MicroSD card which would be able to hold about 3000 pictures from my DSLR.

In stock, I have:

• Ilford FP4 Plus (my favourite B&W film)
• Ilford HP5 Plus
• Kodak Ektar 100 (my favourite colour negative film)
• Fuji Pro 160 NS
• Ilford Pan 100
• Tudor 200 (embarrassingly cheap, but cheerful)

Film is fun, kids!

Processing black & white film at home is easy. You just need a changing bag to load the film into a tank in darkness, and the rest can be done in the bathroom with the light turned on. The chemicals for black & white are normally used at 20°C but can be used at room temperature if you compensate for the time. You could even pop the chemicals in the microwave for a few seconds.

Many amateur darkroom enthusiasts (until recently, me included) are wary about developing colour film with the C-41 process, on the assumption that it is difficult, confusing, expensive, or all three.

It is true that colour process has to be more accurately temperature-controlled, and that the development should be done at 38°C. Immediately, this conjures up images of having to buy an expensive electronic water bath, such as the Jobo CPE-2. These machines do help, and they do cost hundreds of pounds. However, they’re not necessary. The development usually takes only 3-4 minutes and the later stages do not have to be quite so accurately controlled. This means it’s possible to use a plain warm water bath.

It’s not too expensive or confusing, either. There are beginner’s kits such as the Rollei Digibase C-41 LT20 which include all of the chemicals you need, with instructions. I paid £25 for a kit that can do about 20 films. There are bigger kits which are better value too, and it’s possible to restock on the individual chemicals in future. I’m no expert on the C-41 process, so you should probably read up on C-41 chemistry yourself.

I bought a wallpaper pasting trough for £2 and made a cardboard lid with holes for my bottles and tank to stand in the water. I filled the trough with water at 50°C and stood the bottles and tank in the water to reach the right temperature. The temperature of the water bath fell rapidly at first, and then slowed down. After about 5 minutes the water bath was at about 40°C so I waited until the temperature fell to 38°C, checked the temperature of the developer as well as the water bath, and set the development process going. The thermometer still read 38°C after the development was up.

By the end of the entire process of developing, stopping, bleaching, fixing and stabilising, the temperature of the water bath had fallen to 35°C, but this is still within tolerances.

My message to photographers who are wary of processing colour film at home: don’t be. You have to be careful, but you don’t need any special equipment other than what you’ve already got for your black & white work.

Have fun!

Consumer photographic lenses are almost always sold by their focal length when used on a 35mm camera (or full-frame professional DSLR). It’s already confusing enough to work out what their effective focal length is when used on an APS-C sensor (most consumer DSLRs), but since I’ve been getting into medium-format photography it’s even more confusing to work out what each focal length does what on which camera.

So I’ve done a little research, and prepared a table. I’ve included data for five “common” photography formats with their crop factors. The numbers are the approximate focal lengths in millimetres. Of course the boundaries for each category of lens are rather woolly at best.

Well that’s a question. There’s no easy answer, but I’ll discuss it a little here. If you just want the figures, scroll down to the table!

The number of film “pixels” (grains) does not equal to the resolution of the film – unlike pixels on a digital sensor. For now let’s ignore this fact and get down to some numbers.

I’ve checked in various places, and the consensus seems to be that a frame of 35mm film (24mm × 36mm in size) has up to 20 megapixels, assuming the film is fine-grained, and was exposed and developed properly. We arrive at this number by scanning a negative at progressively higher resolution (in terms of dots per inch, dpi), seeing smaller and smaller artefacts in the picture, until we reach a stage where increasing the dpi of the scan does not yield more smaller grains in the scan. At this stage, we see what digital resolution we have scanned the image at.

There’s massive scope for mishandling film and reducing the fineness of the grains, which means we will effectively lower the digital resolution of the negative. It’s extremely hard to judge this here, so we will assume that our hypothetical photographer was careful in handling his film. We will also ignore any loss of sharpness caused by imperfections in the lens.

Taking the optimum value of 20 megapixels for a 35mm frame, and extrapolating this to other film formats…

As I touched on earlier, raw “pixel” (grain) count doesn’t necessarily give better resolution with film. Grains on film are different sizes and not in a neat grid, like pixels in a digital camera’s sensor. True resolution, as seen with the eye, has more to do with resolving closely-spaced pairs of fine lines.

Given that you usually need more film grains than digital pixels to achieve the same optical resolution as seen by the eye, it’s a reasonable assumption that my 35mm SLR (~20 megapixels) is similarly performing to my Canon 450D DSLR (12 megapixels).

Some high-end digital cameras such as the Hasselblad H4D-60 can now achieve 60 megapixels but this still doesn’t come close to professional medium format cameras using 120 film (still used for lots of magazine and glamour photos), or large-format cameras (still almost exclusively used for landscape photography).

So there you have it. Film can produce a considerably higher optical resolution than digital cameras, when used carefully.

I have worked with film for some time now. From day one I developed my own black & white film at home. This doesn’t take up too much room, so I was able to do it in the bathroom (which is completely internal, with no window).

More recently, I got into printing my negatives rather than just scanning them. For printing, you need more equipment, larger equipment, and a lot of space. Our tiny bathroom wasn’t big enough, so I converted my loft into a darkroom. Here’s how.

I used the space in my loft for my darkroom. It’s quite large, and partially boarded up. I added some more boards to increase the floorspace. Luckily the loft already had a pull-down ladder, so access was easy. You can also see the extension lead I added.

The ladder

For my main work area, I used a spare dining table with two chairs against one wall. There’s no other furniture up there, although I have some boxes to keep things in.

The darkroom

There’s a standing lamp with a 100W bulb which gives reasonable illumination in the work area. The switch is in easy reach of the chair for easy blackout. I also have a clock which ticks loudly, so I can time things in the dark.

The enlarger and lamp

In a couple of areas, the boards overhang joists without reaching the next joist, and so they are unsupported. I taped these areas, and the thin trapdoor, with hazard tape to remind me not to step on them. Luckily these areas are not in the main floor area.

Hazard tape

I also attached some kitchen cupboard handles to the inside of the trapdoor, to make it easier to open from inside. Don’t want to get trapped in the loft!

The trapdoor

There’s no running water, so I bought a jerry can with a tap. This stands on a higher level than the floor, and I put a large bowl underneath the tap. The jerry can holds ten litres, which is enough to last me for several darkroom sessions. I made sure the bowl holds at least ten litres, so it will never accidentally overflow. The paler tray has some small holes at one end, so I can wash prints under running water, while submerged.

The water tank

Being in the loft, with no insulation against the outside world, the temperature can get quite low if the sun isn’t shining. I don’t personally mind being cold, but the chemicals do. I have a fan heater to boost the temperature to an acceptable working range. There’s a thermometer hanging from one of the roof supports. However, I store the chemicals in the house so they keep close to working temperature.

You can also see the safelight in the background, with a choice of three colours.

My thermometer

Also hanging from the roof supports – a drying line for wet prints. This small one only holds three or four prints, but there’s plenty more room to hang more photos.

The drying line

Of course, I’d love a larger workspace, one without roof supports, and one without fibreglass everywhere. But this will do nicely for now, and it’s all I need to develop films and make prints from my classic camera collection.

This is a quick post to share a useful resource I discovered online.

I’m a relative beginner in the darkroom, and occasionally I find that my negatives don’t come out perfectly. It can be hard to know why, what you did wrong, and how you can avoid the same mistake in future.

Fortunately, Olympus have a website about photomicrography which includes pictures of commonly-made black & white film processing errors.

It’s already proven useful to me, since a film that I thought had been fogged by stray light, I now know was caused by expired fixer. The new fixer is already in the post.

A while back I took an interest in infrared photography, and I bought a couple of rolls of Maco 820c infrared film. Using infrared film involves a huge amount of trial and error, and unlike digital cameras, you can’t take one or two pictures and check after each one. You have to shoot a whole film.

My camera’s light meter seemed to be responsive to infrared light, so I let it handle the exposures. Unfortunately I now know that the readings were nonsense, because the film came out almost entirely blank. The pictures that I salvaged weren’t good enough for my photo blog but I did write about the experiment.

This time, with my last roll of Maco film, I decided against trying to do any formal kind of metering. I left the aperture either at f/5.6 or f/8, as it seemed sort of sensible. You don’t want the aperture too small, because the longer wavelength of infrared light will cause diffraction at the diaphragm more easily. Equally, you don’t want it too big because this makes the depth of field smaller. Focussing infrared is already difficult as you can’t see it with your eyes, and has to be done using a red dot on the focus ring. By having a larger depth of field, you can get away with a larger inaccuracy before it looks blurred.

I put the camera in bulb shutter mode and guessed at the exposure time, judging by how brightly the sun was shining, and how warm it felt on my face. I generally exposed for between 5 and 30 seconds.

This time – great success. Practically every image was exposed well. A handful were a bit under- or over-exposed and had lost detail in shadows or highlights, but what can you expect when you choose the exposure time by looking at the sky?

I took a few pictures of a fire in a chimenea. These came out completely blank, so I guess the fire wasn’t emitting anywhere near as much infrared radiation as I thought. I suppose while it feels very hot, it isn’t that bright to look at. The film is sensitive up to 820nm and the filter allows wavelengths longer than 720nm. This is a reasonably wide range, but it’s still “near infrared” (almost-red light) rather than “far infrared” (heat).

The end result is that I’ve created images that are ghostly and every bit as “odd” as I had hoped, from looking at other people’s work. You can see the best pictures from the film on my photo blog.

Recently, I would say that photography is my favourite hobby. But it wasn’t always that way.

Throughout my childhood, I’ve taken pictures of important occasions on single-use cameras. My parents would always buy me a single-use camera before a family holiday, for example. I wasn’t interested in the camera, though.

A few years ago (2005, I think) I lived in hall of residence with a guy who had a “fancy camera”. I was so uninterested in it that I have no idea what it actually was. It was digital, and it had a big lens on it. This just goes to show that I didn’t care about photography at the time.

More recently, in 2007, I had a Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone. For a phone, it had an extremely decent camera and could compete with some of the entry-level digital compacts available at the time. But I still only really used it for taking photos of things that were happening around me.

But then, my colleague Paul starting doing his photo-a-day in 2008. I became a keen follower of his photo blog, and started to take “arty” shots on my phone. I enjoyed it so much that I quickly ran into the limitations of my phone and started wondering about buying a “real” camera.

There was a decent superzoom “bridge” camera in the office so I borrowed this for a few days and had great fun with it. Then unfortunately I was involved in an accident and dislocated my shoulder. Stuck at home, bored, I bought a camera. It was a bridge camera, one mark up on the one I’d borrowed from work. I bought it primarily as a high-tech toy, and with not much interest in the art of photography.

This was the stimulus I needed, and with a powerful and versatile camera I tried all sorts of photography. Gradually I became interested in the art of taking photos, and I now try to take photos that are nice to look at, as well as fun to take.

In 2009, I was given an unwanted 35mm SLR. At first I was sceptical – how useful could film be? I bought some film and had a go. I really enjoyed using an SLR for the first time and immediately wanted a DSLR.

In 2010, I caved in and bought a DSLR. I also continued shooting film and I now have a collection of around ten cameras – all film except for the DSLR. I’m still more interested in the cameras and the techniques in using them, but I hope that my work is also pleasing to look at. Make up your own mind.

Recently I was lent a Kodak Six-20 Brownie box camera. Rather than the 120 medium format film I’ve used in the past, it takes 620 film.

The film stock is identical; only the spools differ. The 620 spool has a thinner axle, the end caps have a smaller diameter by about 2mm, and  the overall length of the entire spool is about 2mm shorter.

Original 120, 620 and modern 120 film spools with modern 120 film

120 film is still readily available but 620 film is very hard to find. There are two options:

• Buy some empty 620 spools, and respool the 120 film in a darkroom
• Modify the 120 spool of each new film by filing it down

I find roll film quite frustrating to work with in a darkroom and I didn’t fancy respooling it unless there was no other choice. So I decided to have a go at butchering a roll of 120. Even if it went wrong, I’d only have ruined £4 of film.

With the film still on the roll as new, I filed down the fatness of the end caps and then filed down their diameter. Fortunately I had one empty 620 spool to use as a template for my hack. It took only about ten minutes, but obviously filing away plastic left a lot of dust, so I had to make sure the film was extremely clean before putting it in the camera. I brushed it, and sprayed it with a can of compressed air.

The film now fits nicely into the Brownie, and I look forward to shooting with it.