How to Set Up a Home Darkroom

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Frank Anderson and I'd like to tell you how to set up a home darkroom, of course first you'll need a room, it doesn't have to be a very big room but it does have to have a water supply and it does have to have some power points. The first thing you have to do is to get the materials to blackout the room, there must be no light coming from the windows and no light coming from the door. Of course, you'll need an arrangement of equipment, for example, you'll need a safe light, you'll also need an enlarger with which you can make black and white or color prints. You'll need an enlarging easel to hold the paper flat, you'll need some photo paper to make the prints with and then you'll need a minimum of three trays to develop and stop and fix your prints. These print tongs are also very useful, you shouldn't put your hands into the chemicals, your skin might be sensitive to it. Of course, you'll need a sink and, in this case, a print washer to wash your prints. The prints can be washed in the sink itself with running water and you can use one of these to plug the sink, so the sink can actually fill up with water and then it won't escape by the top of the tunnel and you can wash prints in the sink. After your prints are washed you can squeegee them and then you can dry them in racks, if you like, but you can also use one of these, this is quite cheap. It's a print dryer and this will dry resin coated prints very quickly, only a matter of minutes. In order to make up and store chemicals, I would suggest that you try to find storage bottles like these. They're very useful because if the bottle is half, or a little bit more than half full, you can compress it like this to exclude air from the container inside and that way you can keep the liquid for much longer. You'll need some measuring cylinders for mixing chemicals and you'll also need a timer to time your exposures. In this particular case, this enlarger comes with a timer, if it doesn't you can use timers like these or you can use, very small and very convenient digital timers like these. Finally, although, again, it's not necessary because you can do it simply by hand, it can be very useful and release you to do other things, if you buy a film processor. These processors are useful because they rotate the developing tanks and keep fresh develop around fresh chemicals, coming to the film and they do it instead of you so they can release you to do other things."