How do I give a darkroom course without negatives from the attendees?

Question

I will give a short, one-time darkroom course for a small number of people who largely have little to no film photography experience and thus don't own any negatives that can be printed during the course.

A big fun factor in seeing the darkroom at work for the first time (and all other times) is seeing your own image appearing on the paper.

I am a little hesistent having them print my own negatives, since I do sell my own darkroom prints and the course price will not and cannot cover the costs of a print of one of my photos. I'm therefore looking for a way to help engage the attendees with printing photos that will attract their attention.

I have thought of lending them my camera during a session so they have some shots of their own, but this will require additional logistics and having multiple people depending on a single camera is far from ideal.

Answer 1

Make negatives specifically for the course:

Ask yourself what you want to actually teach in your class, and come up with negatives to function as aids to those lessons.

• If all the students are going to learn is how to mix chemistry, expose photo paper, and what order/timing to dunk the sheets in the tanks, then why on earth is anyone Paying for that when it is basically written on the labels of the stuff they would need to buy to do it themselves?

So what could useful negatives be?

• Focus on technical and primary lesson details. Possibly some simple 'still life' image that carries a variety of textures and details to be explored. Students are there to learn to print, not to walk away with a million dollar masterpiece.
• Light and frame the scene a few different ways, and take lots of duplicates so that everyone can have a copy at hand. [And so that you have spares already made for if a student badly scratches a negative and you decide to still put the course on again.] Bonus points to you if you can come up with a scene that shows off different competing composition options, such as one framing heavily reliant on rule of thirds, while another framing skips that and relies on leading lines instead.
• Design your images to demonstrate "Good and bad" negatives, giving you the opportunity to highlight what makes a negative easy to print, various pitfalls that make it harder, and how basic dodging and burning can recover otherwise 'unusable' images.

Answer 2

A big fun factor in seeing the darkroom at work for the first time (and all other times) is seeing your own image appearing on the paper

So... Let them have fun then!

There are several projects they can do without taking the source images themselves, for example, a photo collage.

Let them expose several images together. Let them make masks with cardboard, and expose different zones of the paper.

You can make some abstract art. This way the pice will be theirs.

You can prepare for example, for a workshop of 10 people some 40 negatives of landscapes and 40 of portraits. They can pick some 4 random landscapes and try to make a scene with them combining the images with 1 portrait from a pile of 4. Or they can go to a collective light table where they choose one portrait and leave the other 30ish they are not currently using.

Give them 2 -3 pieces of black paper and some scissors for them to make masks. Show them to dodge and burn with them, or leave them over the paper.

Or try to add texture to a photo of a face, or texture of a sky on a landscape.

Give them some permanent black markers and let them make blotches of lines and use them to make new masks.

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You can also take one portrait of themselves or a loved one!

If you can not take the photo one day prior to the event, let them send a good quality portrait of them and take a photo to be used in the collage!

It does not matter if you need to take the photo out of your screen.

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Of course, this needs some planning and testing to give specific guidelines. But I'm sure that this will be more fun than just making one photo of a random thing on the workshop building, even if they pushed the button.

I'm thinking of stuff like this.

That would be a fun darkroom workshop!

Answer 3

If the purpose of the course is to give your students an experience of the darkroom in one day then I would stick with cameraless photography, i.e. photograms, and not worry about making negatives with a camera. There is just no way to teach iso, aperture, shutter speed, metering, developing regimes, etc in a single day. If this class has no prerequisites then you can be sure there will be someone who has never taken a picture with anything but their phone.

Many people are unlikely to have the opportunity to experiment in a darkroom. The excitement of seeing an image form in the developer will be memorable, particularly if it's fun and they are not bogged down by technique at the get go. Have a variety of items to work with, contact print drawings on mylar, flowers, negatives, etc. Everyone gets a pane of glass with the edges ground down (otherwise there will be bleeding).

Be prepared for at least some of the following, particularly if multiple enlargers are used and students are allowed to work without total supervision:

• Someone will contaminate the developer by putting their print in the fixer first then moving it to the developer
• Someone will fog everyone's work by removing the filter drawer with white light pouring out
• People will bump into each other causing x to happen

Have fun! Get people excited about working in a darkroom. For most, this will be a one off experience.

Answer 4

In old-school darkroom classes, contact prints straight from silhouette-giving objects were not an uncommon exercise (exposing them with an un-loaded enlarger).

One possibility might be renting, acquiring, or improvising a digital enlarger (that can project a digital image onto photo paper). Such devices exist, but for experimental results, it might be well possible to jury-rig an ordinary projector.

Answer 5

Do you have a large format camera?

If so, set up a studio portrait area, pre-lit etc but let them click the shutter to photograph each other, or whatever else they might like on orthochromatic film.

Then you can develop the negs in trays under a safelight, just like you were planning to do for paper, and make contact prints with them after lunch.

If you use the enlarger for your light source, you can still show them how to use VC papers, and quite a bit of dodging/burning is still possible with contact printing.

So best of all worlds (given the constraint of one day and nobody has any cameras yet) -- no dark-dark room is needed, they get to develop by film by inspection, with all the magic that entails -- and also make some lovely little contact portraits of themselves to take home.

Answer 6

Make with them a few pinhole cameras (cans or boxes) to shoot on photosensitive paper. It’s great fun and you’ll teach them how to take and develop their own BW pictures with little equipment at home.

1. Let them take some long exposure pictures.
2. Teach them how to develop the photosensitive resin paper under safe light to get a negative of the image.
3. Teach them how to obtain a positive of their images using contact printing by placing under a relative heavy safety glass a their negative facing down and on top of a new photosensitive resin paper facing up and exposing it to a strong light source.
4. Let them develop their positives with the knowledge attained in step 2.

If you are interested in pinhole photography you should check “Pinhole Photography – History, Images, Cameras, Formulas” by Jon Grepstad

Answer 7

How much lead time do you have for the course?

If there is enough time the students can ask their parents or other relatives for negatives from the participants childhood.

Of course not everyone keeps their negatives, so a backup solution may still be needed.

Answer 8

You assemble a plethora of already processed black & white negatives and likewise prints. Treat all with Farmers 'Reducer or with C-41 bleach (not the combined bleach & fix). This reducing (bleaching) step will render the images clear or nearly so, ig will almost disappear. Now demonstrate the chemical steps of the developing of the photo process. Use a photo paper developer in a tray in the light. The images will re-appear and you will be a hero!.