Looking back at the photographic darkroom

in Looking back at Photographic Film  I  looked at types of film, But film needs treatment, in the dark,  after exposure to reveal  and fix the images. THis is normally done in a  darkroom, a room from whch light is excluded

Chemical darkrooms died with digital. Well, largely. Instead of huddling in dark rooms breathing in developer and fixer fumes people now sit in front of a computer screen, straining their eyes and risking RSI. Anyone trying to set up a darkroom in their own home now would probably be breaking numerous health and safety laws, and given local government's increasingly reflex habit of covert surveillance of the people they purportedly serve, could not ignore these laws. The digital darkroom offers many advantages at a lower cost

Photographic film is basically a plastic film covered or impregnated with light sensitive chemicals. After exposure to light the film has to be washed in various chemicals, known collectively as the developer, at the right temperature for the right length of time and in total darkness in order to reveal the images. The images fade if exposed to light so the developed film must be rinsed and washed in a second set of chemicals called a fixer which stabilise the image. It can then be removed and viewed in normal light.

Producing a print involves projecting the image on the film onto a piece of light sensitive paper for a period of time and then washing the paper in the developer for the right length of time, rinsing it and then washing it in the fixer, rinsing it and hanging it out to dry. Positioning the paper and developing and fixing had to be done in total darkness.

Determining how long to expose the paper was a matter of trial and error, and trial prints with the exposure varying cross the print were the normal method of establishing this. It was also possible to burn in selected parts of the image by shielding the rest of the image from the light and similarly to reduce exposure of parts of the image by shielding it from the light.

Each type of film, black and white or colour, print or slide needed different chemicals. The entry cost of setting up a darkroom (The family tended to object if you used the bathroom for long periods) and the ongoing cost of chemicals and paper left a market gap for laboratories to process other people's films. In the case of Kodachrome the processing was long and hazardous and the film was always sold with processing included in the price.

Cross processing, developing slide films as print or vice versa was largely an amateur preserves since many processing laboratories were afraid a film of the wrong type would ruin the whole batch they were processing, which made getting cross processing handled by a laboratory an expensive proposition. Now cross processing can easily be simulated digitally. However it was always possible to get a laboratory to vary the development time of slide film to compensate for a short exposure by over developing and for a long exposure by underdeveloping, procedures known as pushing and pulling.

Black and white versus colour photography used to be an either or affair with Black and white becoming increasingly expensive as it became a minority pursuit either for creatives or for those rare cases when colour was a problem. Hand colouring of black and white prints has given way to multiple ways to remove colour from your images and one can easily simulate most toning techniques ( I have yet to find out how to simulate gold toning though) or “lost” techniques like cyanotyping.

Removing unwanted objects (mothers in law?) from photographs is easier than with film and the cheapness of digital means it is easy to photograph landmarks both with and without added family or partners. Adding objects is more complicated and takes rather more time and panoramic cameras and film are not needed so much now pictures can be blended digitally.

The Achilles heel of digital is noise. Where film could capture a wide dynamic range of intensities and low light simply meant a darker image, adjacent pixels of a digital sensor may record differnet values even for a plain subject. The larger the sensor the less noise is a problem and top level Digital SLRs have almost eliminated noise as a problem. There is a second source of noise. Compact cameras and most bridge cameras save a picture as a compressed JPEG image and the process of compression intriduces noiselike artefacts that can sometimes make producing large prints impossible. As a rule cheaper compacts are more prone to such noise as the makers anticipate few will want to produce prints larger than 10 by 8. The film equivalent of noise is grain but unlike grain noise cannot be used creatively.

One other problem with digital is that the three colour sensors on a digital camera have different sensitivities, so the camera responds most to green, and less to red and blue. One camera I had tended to wash out red flowers unless drastically underexposed. It seems to me that makers are overcoming this problem which will vanish with time

The digital revolution has been a great step forward for most photographers, giving rise to the disposable picture, self publishing via blogs or websites, and allowing the average photographer to manipulate images in a way undreamed of a decade ago. The elimination of film allows greater experimentation and the production of pictures that will never be printed.

With all these advantages it seems churlish to mention that most digital cameras now take control away from the photorgrapher rather than relieving them of drudgery. Often the user cannot adjust exposure and spot metering is not possible. The landscape mode of some cameras simply sets the focus to infinity rather than to half the hyperfocal distance but the user is left unaware of this.

The answer is for the keen amateur to become aware of some of the technicalities of photography and digital photography and ensure the camera they buy matches their needs.