For those photographers who want to give film-based darkroom work a try, the process hasn’t changed much over many decades. Nor is it much different in a commercially built darkroom. While the home darkroom may be a lot more, well, rustic, you can emerge with prints fully as high in quality as you’ll find in the commercial darkrooms. All it takes is a little practice.
Chemical-based images using a negative/positive process date from the very beginnings of photography. While Daguerre’s famous process of 1839 made unique pictures on copper plates, William Henry Fox Talbot (Cambridge University grad!) within two years unveiled the negative/positive process that came to dominate the industry for more than a century and a half.
This tutorial includes a short history of negative/positive-based photography processes, photographs, and three video demonstrations in the darkroom.
