There’s a certain kind of alchemy that happens under the soft glow of a safelight. In a world saturated with digital images, stepping into a darkroom to craft a black and white print by hand feels like tapping into a more fundamental form of photography. It’s a process that demands patience, intuition, and a willingness to embrace imperfection. The reward isn’t just a physical object, but the deep satisfaction of having coaxed an image into existence through light and chemistry.
Setting the Stage: The Darkroom Environment
Before the magic can happen, the stage must be set. A functional darkroom doesn’t need to be palatial, but it does require absolute darkness, save for the specific wavelength of the safelight. The core components are the enlarger (your light source for projecting the negative), trays for developer, stop bath, and fixer chemicals, tongs for handling prints, a timer, and of course, photographic paper. Running water is essential for washing prints effectively. Organization is key; knowing where everything is in near darkness prevents costly mistakes or contaminated chemistry.
The First Look: Creating a Contact Sheet
Before diving into enlarging a single frame, the contact sheet is your indispensable guide. It’s essentially a positive proof of every frame on your roll of negatives, printed directly onto a single sheet of photographic paper. To make one, you lay your strips of negatives (emulsion side down) directly onto a sheet of paper (emulsion side up) under the enlarger. A clean piece of glass holds the negatives flat. You then expose the paper to white light from the enlarger (lens stopped down usually two or three stops from wide open) for a predetermined time, often found through a quick test strip. After processing, the contact sheet reveals:
- Which frames are technically sound (exposure, focus).
- The potential compositional strength of each image.
- A baseline for density and contrast.
Studying the contact sheet, often with a loupe, is where the editing process truly begins. You identify the candidates worthy of enlargement and gain initial insights into how they might need to be printed.
Finding the Light: The Test Strip
Once you’ve chosen a negative to enlarge, the next crucial step is the test strip. Rarely will a random guess yield the perfect exposure time. The test strip is a systematic way to determine the correct exposure for a specific print size and aperture setting. Place your chosen negative in the enlarger’s carrier and focus the projected image sharply onto the easel where your paper will sit. Cut a strip of photographic paper (perhaps an inch or two wide) from the same box you intend to use for the final print. Place this strip across a key area of the projected image – one that ideally includes both highlight and shadow detail.
Using a piece of opaque card, you’ll cover most of the strip and expose a small section for a base time (e.g., 5 seconds). Then, you incrementally uncover more of the strip, adding exposure in steps (e.g., uncover another section, expose for another 5 seconds, then another, expose for another 5 seconds). This creates bands of increasing exposure (5, 10, 15, 20 seconds, etc.). Process this strip normally through the developer, stop bath, and fixer. Under white light, you can then examine the strip to see which exposure time yields the best range of tones – highlights with detail (not pure white) and shadows with depth (not pure black). This becomes your starting point for the full print.
Making the Straight Print
Armed with the exposure time determined from your test strip, you’re ready to make your first full print, often called a “straight print.” Place a full sheet of photographic paper in the easel, ensuring it’s correctly positioned and focused. Set the timer for the chosen exposure time and expose the paper. Process the print carefully: immerse it fully and evenly in the developer, agitating gently according to the paper manufacturer’s instructions (typically 60-90 seconds). Use tongs to lift the print, letting it drain briefly before moving it to the stop bath for about 30 seconds with agitation. Finally, move it to the fixer, again agitating for the recommended time (often a few minutes). Only after proper fixing can the print be safely viewed in full room light. This first print serves as a baseline – it might be perfect, but more often, it reveals areas that need refinement.
Chemical Safety is Paramount. Always work in a well-ventilated area when mixing or using darkroom chemicals. Wear protective gloves (like nitrile gloves) and safety glasses to avoid skin and eye contact. Clearly label all chemical containers and follow manufacturer instructions for mixing, use, and disposal meticulously.
The Art of Manipulation: Dodging and Burning
Few negatives produce a perfect print straight away. More often, some areas are too dark while others are too light. This is where dodging and burning come in – techniques as old as printing itself, allowing you to selectively adjust exposure in specific areas.
Dodging (Lightening Areas)
Dodging involves selectively blocking light from reaching certain areas of the print during the main exposure. This results in those areas receiving less light and appearing lighter in the final print. Tools can be as simple as your hands or custom shapes cut from cardboard attached to thin wire. For example, if a face in a portrait is slightly too dark, you might use a small circular tool on a wire to hover over the face area for a portion of the total exposure time, constantly moving it slightly to avoid creating obvious outlines. The key is subtlety; you’re gently holding back exposure, not eliminating it.
Burning (Darkening Areas)
Burning is the opposite: selectively adding extra exposure to specific areas after the main exposure is complete, making them darker in the final print. This is often done to enhance detail in highlights, like bringing out texture in a bright sky, or darkening distracting bright edges. Typically, you use your hands or a piece of card with a strategically sized hole cut in it. After the main exposure, you shield the rest of the print while allowing extra light from the enlarger to pass through the hole (or shaped by your hands) onto the area you want to darken. Again, constant slight motion is crucial to blend the effect seamlessly. Burning usually requires significantly more time than the base exposure – you might burn an area for an additional 10, 20, or even more seconds, often determined through further test strips focused on that specific area.
Mastering dodging and burning takes practice. It’s about learning to see how specific amounts of light reduction or addition affect the tones on the paper. Keep notes on your exposure times, dodging/burning times, and filter settings for each print; it helps replicate results and learn faster.
Controlling the Mood: Contrast Filters
Black and white printing isn’t just about brightness; it’s also about contrast – the difference between the darkest blacks and the brightest whites. Most modern black and white papers are “variable contrast” (VC). This means their contrast can be adjusted by using colored filters in the enlarger’s light path, typically placed in a filter drawer below the lamp or below the lens.
These filter sets range from 00 (very low contrast) to 5 (very high contrast), usually in half steps. Lower numbered filters (more yellow) decrease contrast, useful for negatives that are inherently too contrasty. Higher numbered filters (more magenta) increase contrast, ideal for flat, low-contrast negatives. A grade 2 or 2.5 filter is often considered “normal” contrast. Changing filters often necessitates adjusting exposure time, so a new test strip is usually required after selecting a filter.
Split-Filter Printing
For advanced control, some printers use split-filter printing. This involves making two exposures onto the same sheet of paper: one with a low-contrast filter (like 00 or 0) primarily to set the highlight exposure, and a second exposure with a high-contrast filter (like 4 or 5) to set the shadow density. This technique can offer nuanced control over the entire tonal range, especially with challenging negatives.
Archival Considerations: Washing and Drying
Creating a beautiful print is only half the battle; ensuring it lasts is equally important. Residual fixer left in the paper fibers will eventually cause staining and degradation. Thorough washing is critical to remove these chemicals. Archival washing typically involves rinsing the print in running water for an extended period (30 minutes to an hour, depending on the paper type and setup) or using a hypo clearing agent bath followed by a shorter wash time. Fiber-based papers require much longer washing times than resin-coated (RC) papers.
Once washed, prints must be dried carefully. RC papers dry relatively quickly and flat, often just by air-drying on screens or hanging them up. Fiber-based papers are more prone to curling. They can be air-dried face down on clean fiberglass screens, placed in a heated flatbed dryer, or ferrotyped for a high-gloss finish (though this is less common now). Proper drying prevents physical damage and ensures the print remains flat.
Final Touches: Spotting
Even with meticulous darkroom hygiene, tiny white spots caused by dust on the negative or paper are almost inevitable. Spotting is the final retouching step, where these imperfections are carefully filled in using specialized spotting dyes or inks and a very fine brush (like a 000 sable brush). The goal is to match the density and tone of the surrounding area so the spot disappears. This requires a delicate touch and good light, but it’s the finishing polish that elevates a good print to a great one.
The journey of making a black and white print in the darkroom is immersive and deeply rewarding. It connects you to the photographic process in a tangible way that clicking a mouse cannot replicate. Every print tells a story – not just the image itself, but the story of its creation through your hands, eyes, and decisions under the glow of the safelight. Don’t be afraid to experiment, make mistakes, and find your own rhythm in the quiet hum of the darkroom.
