Darkroom Class

I just finished a darkroom photography class at VisArts Richmond. It was an amazing experience.

During the course of the class we got to go into the darkroom and learn how to do basic darkroom printing from contact prints to actual enlargement of 35mm negatives.

If you have any desire to learn traditional film photography I highly recommend taking a darkroom class. This was the first time I had even stepped into a darkroom and it (ironically) opened up my eyes to how black and white photography actually works.

These are all scans of prints I made during the class…

The first one is just a contact print of a film reel, some random netting, and a glass jar - with a plastic skull inside. Very artsy.

This was my first contact print of a developed roll of film. Kind of a watershed moment for me.

A couple of test prints to test exposure time before printing. I learned during this class that if I keep doing darkroom printing I’ll never need to buy another bookmark.

The rest are the prints I thought were decent enough to share. Not one of them is perfect, but I like them. And more importantly, I know what I don’t like about them so I can fix them if I choose to reprint and hopefully not repeat those mistakes.

It’s a process and I’m just starting to learn how to print. I plan on doing much more printing (rather than scanning and editing on the computer) in the future.