This Past Summer
This past summer I built a darkroom in my basement apartment. Guess I’ve come a long way since the first post on this blog.
This past week, a series of prints that I developed in that darkroom are now for sale at a local art shop called Iris Arts in Cambridge Ontario. Guess, I’ve really come a long way since the first post on this blog.
It takes about 3 minutes total to see the image on the paper, once you get the enlarger in focus in the darkroom. About 2 seconds once you press the shutter button on your iphone.
The 3 minutes time statement is a lie actually. I took these images 3 years ago, on a old Bronica ETRSI medium format camera that I traded a bunch of thrifted Polaroid camera’s for at Burlington Camera.
So I guess, these photo’s took 3 years to appear on paper.
Speaking of thrift shops. I was at one about 2 years ago and stumble across a box loaded with darkroom equipment. Up until that moment in my life I had never even seen darkroom equipment in real life before. Literally everything except the chemicals and a dark light sealed room was in that box. For $40 (which I actually didn’t have at the time) was all they were asking for about (if sourced all individually) $1000 + worth of gear. So smacked that $40 dollar charge on to my credit card and brought it home, cleaned it all up, and stored it in my dads basement for about 2 years.
One day early 2018 I was taking a pee in a small unfinished bathroom. It had a small window, bunch of two by fours and running water. I thought, after flushing the toilet of course, I could block out that window and make this into a darkroom.
So this summer, I decided to follow through with that, I pulled out the 1000 archived negatives from the past 5 years and decided to find something to print and hang on my wall.
I’m really glad I did that.
More to come soon.
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Thanks for reading this
