Dark Room

The process of shooting, developing and printing my own black and white photography has been the most challenging but rewarding task so far. Even though it was not my first time shooting on black and white film, it was my first time taking my time to study the shots I was taking to be able to get a good final result and also my first time developing my own film. I found that in the first roll of film I shot I was more careless when pressing the shutter button, not paying attention to what light I was shooting in and how it would reflect in black and white, I was able to see this in the inconsistency of the exposures. Learning from my initial mistakes I realised I had completely changed my way of thinking when choosing what to shoot for black and white. This resulted in my second roll being much more uniform and I could see the improvements and I was much more pleased with the outcome.

While I am still not confident in the idea of being in the dark room and developing film unsupervised, the hardest part of this project for me was choosing what images to print. I found it very hard to judge what would work best as an enlarged print and what to me was a great image on the contact sheet left me disappointed once I saw the final print. I am not fully satisfied with my final product, but I am positive that if I was to start again I would make better judgments as I think that I have gained some skill to evaluate what will work and what won’t a little better.

For me personally I don’t think I can choose a specific aspect of the project that was the most rewarding. I enjoyed every step, even if sometimes a little frustrating. The whole process from walking around, seeing interesting compositions, taking the shots, developing the film, making the contact sheet and subsequently final prints, was very exciting and I would be happy spending most of my time doing this. Like all processes it can have it’s up and downs, but I have loved knowing that even if not perfect, the final prints I will be handing in were thought and produced by me, with help on the side of course.

After completing this project I can say that it has sparked a new interest in black and white photography for me. While I am more attracted to colour film, I am looking forward to bettering my skills in making black and white images. I have learned many things on this project starting from the different way of thinking when making black and white images as opposed to colour. As I had never developed film on my own before it was fascinating to find out what part each chemical plays in producing an image both on the film and on paper and the fragility of the process. But mostly I learned a lot from print making, I made many mistakes to try and achieve the final print I wanted and even at the end I was not fully satisfied but I am glad to have gone through this learning experience and it has given me a lot of motivation to get better.