Darkroom Photography Skills

Darkroom photography describes the process of creating pictures or slides from exposed film used in traditional non-digital cameras.

Darkroom refers to the room where the processing of the film would take place, named because the room would need to be free of white light. For some film processing steps the room would need to be in total darkness, but for most steps the darkroom could be illuminated with low level amber lighting.

Depending on the type of film used, there were either one or two basic steps to the darkroom process. The first step would be to process or “develop” the film. Developing the film involved placing it into a series of liquid solutions for specific time periods, usually between one and five minutes for each step. For black and white film processing there were four solutions: developer, stop bath, fixer, and hypo clearing agent. After the development process the film would be allowed to dry, usually suspended off lines strung in the darkroom similar to hanging clothes on a clothesline.

If the film being processed was slide or transparency film then the next step would be to mount the individual slides into frames so the pictures could be used in a projector.

<<<<<<< This skill is not completely obsolete. Many of the best studio photographers still use film, though only in larger format cameras (4×5). >>>>>>>

The print making phase - especially in black and white photography - provided operational latitude for quality enhancement or artful expression. In the enlarging process the film negative image was projected through a lens onto a sheet of photosensitive paper for several seconds. Overall brightness was controlled by exposure time with a shorter time producing a lighter print. Contrast could be controlled by selecting various grades of paper and/or developing formulas.

Dark areas of the photo could be made slightly lighter with a technique called dodging. A small disk of paper or pasteboard fastened to a length of stiff wire is suspended over the area of interest for part of the enlarging exposure time. Skillful motion and timing techniques limit the light exposure of the area causing it to appear brighter in the finished print with no obvious shadow outline of the tool. This could often be used to bring out detail that would otherwise be hidden in the dark overexposed area.

The inverse of dodging called burning in was achieved using a large piece of pasteboard with a hole in the center. Similar timing and motion techniques are used to allow longer exposure in lighter areas - dense negative areas - reducing contrast and bringing out otherwise washed out details in the finished print.

Fortunately, this skill is not obsolete, many fine art photographers use film – in all sizes. Which means that there are many people who still know how and still develop film and make prints.

This still is by no means obsolete, and is useful for far more than just studio photographers and artists.

There is no digital camera made capable of the kinds of shots you see in most magazines, especially of outdoor areas. Even medium format cameras are far superior to anything digital.

It might be obsolete for an individual to have darkroom skills because you can send your film off to commercial darkrooms, but that happened decades ago. The skill is not obsolete, it has just moved to mostly commercial processing. That's true of most digital processing too, since very few people using digital cameras do any kind of processing on their own.

— [Edited 14 March 2010] There seems to be a lot of non-professional or unskilled photography people here. Darkroom skills are essential. However, digital photography is more than capable of producing images for magazines of the highest quality. And this has been true for years. Pro magazine and news photographers, for the most part, moved to digital years ago. In fact, the bottleneck for picture quality is with the paper used for publication - it always has been. The tonal width of paper is far less than either film or digital.