"Dark room without the dark room..." by Freya Sedgwick

By Camp America on 15/06/2016

Hey guys! So today’s blog post is going to be a bit of a different one! How exciting! On camp this summer I’m teaching dark room photography. For anyone who doesn’t know what this is...

It’s basically developing the photos you took on your throw away camera years ago, at music festivals or on holidays as a kid with the little film inside! Remember when you’d send them off to Boots and get them back a few weeks later? Yeah it’s basically that. 

Dark rooms are ridiculously expensive because of the cost of the materials which are needed but I wanted to teach you guys how to create a photo in a similar way, without actually using a dark room. Obviously this won’t have people on it and be in the most amount of detail but it’s all about using what you find around you to create a cute little photo that you may not have known how to do before! 

All you need to do this is some photo paper in a light sensitive box (which it often comes in, depending on the make), some things from round the house which can be literally anything (toys, buttons etc or even flowers from outside) and a sheet of glass (optional). 

You can very easily do this whole thing in your bedroom. Sit on your floor or something and make sure you know where everything is, then turn out the light and make sure it’s pitch black. You can then take photo paper out of the box and arrange your stuff on top. At this point you can put your glass over the top of you have it, if not don’t worry! Then simply turn on a lamp over the top or take it into the garden to expose it! Depending whether your using sunlight or a lamp it can take different amounts of time, for example lamps can take around 1-4 hours. Just carefully keep checking until it looks how you want it to! 

When you’ve finished they should look something like this created by Mike Dunkey. 

Let me know how they turned out if you try it! 

The full tutorial can be found here: http://gizmodo.com/5894634/how-to-make-photographic-prints-without-a-camera-or-chemicals

Bye for now!