A Tale of Two Darkrooms

On Tuesday, we spent nearly the entire class in the darkroom printing our depth of field assignment, and I struggled mightily. I already had developed the negatives and made a contact sheet and knew which images I wanted to print, so went straight to it.

I made half a dozen test strips at least and five prints but none of them were ever satisfactory, no matter what I did. I tried different contrast filters, adding more time, even tried using different paper. The one thing I did NOT do was try a different enlarger. Both my instructor and I were stumped at the end of the day.

She obviously gave this some thought and emailed me after class and suggested I try printing the image using my little home darkroom setup so we could rule out a problem with the enlarger I was using in the lab. So I set about doing that.

For those of you who don’t follow me on BlueSky, you may not know that I have carved out a light-tight space for myself in my condo building in a utility area under the stairs that is used by maintenance but is accessible by tenants. I set up my equipment when I want to print and take it all down and remove it as soon as I am done, so they never know I am there. I call it my “guerilla darkroom.” I’m not harming anything, just using a tiny, empty space.

At any rate, Wednesday, I did just that — set up the guerilla darkroom — and got to printing. It took me one test strip and one print to arrive at something better than I struggled for five hours to do in the lab on Tuesday. That solved that mystery: the problem was the enlarger. Don’t know what’s wrong with it — a hazed lens or a condenser that is out of alignment or what.

I mailed my instructor back and showed her pictures of both prints shown here in this post. She was thrilled and suggested an alternative enlarger I can use in the lab.

Since I had the guerilla darkroom set up, I went on to make more prints and another contact sheet from another roll. Got ahead on my assignments for class, actually. It’s so much work to get the darkroom assembled, and I had the chemistry mixed. Might as well make the most of it. All in all, a productive day of printing!

Guerilla darkroom print/Lab darkroom print