DARKROOM BUILD

There are more and more of you reading my blogs and watching my videos on YouTube channel and I am beyond grateful if I was able to help you in any way. I am finally starting to form a group of creative individuals who are interested in similar topics like me. We are helping each other and growing together so thank you again Back to the Container Darkroom. There is less and less work that needs to be done until I will be able to say I am finished. At this point there are mostly details left or just some modifications...

I built myself a darkroom sink (LINK) a while ago but It wasn't connected with water until recently. Finally got a plumber in the container to help me out. Because containers may be transported to another location in the future the water system has to be easy to detach and mounted on the surface. Plumber did the work accordingly. At the end there were two workers that arrived early in the morning and worked for around 2h. The whole installation was quite complicated with most of the things in place already there was not much room to work. I rushed...

At the moment I have a simple red light bulb from Dr. Fischer installed on the ceiling which is pretty dim and radiates a lot of heat so I started looking for alternatives. I am aware that there are special led safelights that are sold for 200eur + a piece and I just can not afford it. If you didn’t know the best red safelights reach peak wavelength at around 620-630 nm. If they are in this range they are suitable for use in the darkroom without fogging the bw photographic material. Safelight is usually made from an ordinary light...

Container is looking more and more like a darkroom. I have done quite a lot of work  inside lately especially wiring which was exhausting. I really respect all the people in the construction industry after the work I have done. Container without AC is like a greenhouse reaching up to 35 °C (90°F) and pulling cables through the wall and mounting them is like working in hell. So my main focus now was how to cool everything down. As the winters can be quite cold here in Slovenia the best solution for me was to get an AC. At the...

So happy that things are slowly starting to come together. Container looks more and more like an actual darkroom. The sink is just waiting for the plumber to connect everything and there is still so much work to do. I had to instal cabinets and shelves for storage so there was some designing ahead of me again. I knew that for sure I wanted to have a counter on one side of the sink where I will be able to coat dry plates, paper, etc. and potentially install an enlarger in the future. I like to have a lot of...

After finishing the sink in the previous post I had to try how it works. I am still waiting for the plumber to instal the taps, water heater…so I had to do it manually. I took a watering can filled it with water and poured a fair amount of water inside. Epoxy is behaving great and water flows straight to the drain. I started with a 1cm drop from one side of my 2m sink to the other but I think that the angle is too big so I will try to make it smaller. Drain is deep enough into...

After a week of waiting the paint has finally arrived. I used West System epoxy 105 + 206. First off all I have to mention that I have never used epoxy before so while I was waiting for the package I started searching for tips and tricks on how to use it. First of all I had to find a way to colour the transparent epoxy to white. At the end I used simple mat white pigment which had to be mixed into the epoxy. Mixing in pigment was probably the hardest thing while working as it is very hard...

My container darkroom is slowly coming together. Space is separated into light and dark areas, doors are installed so the next step was building furniture from tables, storage cabinets and the essential piece of every darkroom is the sink. I have some experience with college dakrooms and sinks that are being used there so I had a slight idea how everything should look and work. When surfing the web looking for plans or ideas I haven’t found much besides a few forum posts and youtube videos. My darkroom sink will be placed opposite to the door at the end of the...

I am crazy excited to start working and designing my own working space. As I said in my previous post I will be splitting the container thru the middle to get a darkroom and lightroom space. Because of this I had to construct a partition wall. I used 8x5cm wooden slats to build a frame. I was using a miter saw which really makes everything so much easier. Also the walls of the container are made of metal and insulation which makes them only 4,5cm thick. I had to be careful when selecting the screws so they were not too...

The last few “corona” months I had a lot of time to think about my future as an artist and photographer. I accepted a decision that has been on my mind for quite some time now and just needed a slight push to get the ball rolling. Like usual I was setting up the temporary darkroom in my toilet to develop a dry plate, putting thick black trash bags on windows and doors, covering cabinets, searching for my headlamp (emits red safelight) etc. and I hand enough. I did not want to spend a minute more setting up everything so...