oh this is great :3 makes me wish I still had access to a darkroom, I liked developing my own photos.

I loved photography classes so much I grew to really like the smell of developing chemicals.

For me, it's very nostalgic to catch a whiff of it. I don't miss smelling it on my fingers, though.

After working in a darkroom, it took me several years before I could put vinegar on my sandwich again... the thought of ingesting stop bath! :-P

"Not pictured: Pungent chemical odor and old, terrifyingly-labeled bottles found under the counter."

First things that became apparent when I walked into the Dark Room at the Cinema im Organist at .. Thankfully the smell doesn't leak into the auditorium :P

A darkroom in a cinema? Interesting.

It's an odd venue, sort of the Art cinema venue of Newcastle over here in the UK for non mainstream, I really know nothing about anything in there that isn't to do with projectors/lighting or organs, but they bought up a large amount of old equipment when people started switching to Digital, half needs restoring but they do some interesting stuff there.


http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/ If you're interested.

i keep meaning to go there

The light filters through the enlarger perfectly.

Are darkrooms still really used today for professional photography?

It's mainly limited toward individual artists and photographers. Of course, they're still common at colleges for art purposes, but most professionals shoot digital nowadays.

First....I absolutely love this!!! And 2nd, yea my current black and white photo course makes developing sound so ancient and out of date. Also that's kinda what my darkroom looks like, mine is just closet size

Very nostalgic for me. I loved print photography. It still own the first can of film I ever developed.

yiou post 'em, i'll fave 'em

and also
misspell 'em

And I will appreciate your comments regardless of the spelling.

you captured the experience of being in the darkroom perfectly.

And the huge timers! And the revolving door/airlock! Don't forget them!

Huge timers FTW! I remember that from my class.

The door in the pic has a lock on it from the inside, so no airlock. Those were cool too ^_^;

The first darkroom I used had a long, maze-like hallway to block the light from entering. It wasn't until college that I experienced the awesome "airlock" door!

My high school (which was an art school) had one of those. Some classmates and I went into the photography room for some reason (we weren't studying photography, we were in a different department), and I freaked them out by "disappearing" inside it!

Er, the photography room was connected to the darkroom by a spinning "airlock" doorway. I didn't explain that very well.

That's the cleanest, most organized darkroom I've ever seen.

Every college I've studied at or visited had immaculate darkrooms; My high school darkroom was a health inspector's nightmare. The exhaust fans emptied into the unventilated attic. We once found bottles of potassium ferrocyanide, Cibachrome chemicals (especially toxic) and an opaque bottle hand-labeled with only the elemental mark for uranium.

This makes me want to draw something about my print studio.
Lovely work as always.

Thanks! By all means, draw it. I love drawings of creatures doing such things.

I still do darkroom photography in theory, but I havn't in at least a year.

If I start doing it again, I want to try one of the cool digital/darkroom processes: you turn a digital photo into a giant negative, which you can transfer onto the paper like you would with a contact sheet, then do the rest of the steps in the darkroom.

I find it cool that in darkroom prints, the image is made from silver. I also like copper-toning prints, then the image is made from copper. It seems fancier than anything a computer could print.

I like that your subject is always a dependable modest cheerful guy doing something technical and subtly masculine, like fiddling with outdated forms of technology or coordinating airplanes or somesuch. No one else here depicts these everyday things with such charm :3

I imagine these drawings as both a self-portrait and a expression of what I seek. And thank you for the kind compliment.

I continue to love everything you draw~!

:)

This reminds me of curling up in the darkrooms and falling asleep. I'm sure I did some amazing things for my lungs.

I'm sure my lungs have a good coating of silver in them, too. :3

Brings back memories of pottering around in the school darkroom back in the late 1980s :)

I regret never working in a darkroom. I Don't know what i was thinking!

Never worked in this myself but I do know you don't make light of this kind of work.

The consequences of a mistake can be illuminating.

:)

I miss my photog courses, just not the material costs D:

I miss being in a dark, that vague smell of vinegar..

this makes me think of a couple years ago, as a photography undergrad, I would process my film blasting Funker Vogt on my headphones. I still shoot film as much as I can but mostly 120 or 4x5 now.

When I took b&w photography in college it was one of my favorite classes always had a lot of fun trying to do really cool shots and then develop everything.

Love love love love LOVE this <3

I never got the hang of doing this myself. I'd always take the prints out of the liquid too soon and they'd have this surreal overexposed look.

How do you do keep doing it? I am constantly amazed how you evoke a simpler time with soft fuzzy characters.

Thank you! I just think of my own upbringing in the 80's and 90's, and I try to keep the backgrounds and settings as faithful as possible to that time.