The other day I posted an update on The Dry Side of my darkroom, and promised an update on the wet side soon. Here it is, again mostly in pictures. All of the following work was done last weekend.

Incidentally, some of the doubters got me feeling a little paranoid about the solidity of my dry-side enlarger bench, so I ended up putting small angle brackets on the top side of the tabletop and larger ones underneath. The resulting bench feels solid as can be. It is completely unaffected if I pull or push it in any direction except up (the front of the tabletop is not attached to the legs), and I can hoist my entire 250-lb. frame up and sit on it and it remains completely unperturbed. However, when I whack on it with my fist, the metal shelf does absorb some vibrational energy and feeds it back to the tabletop for a second or two. I might take Pak's advice and load up the bottom shelf with a couple of boxes full of books; Or, I might remove the wire shelves altogether and install two 4x4" wooden legs on the front corners. It would be easy to do. I even have some nice big brackets on hand, left over from a past project.

But back to the wet side. Here's the "before" view from the dry side looking back into the basement. This is significant mainly because it shows where the water is—the laundry sink over by the washing machine (underneath the light). That will be getting some substantial modifications eventually, but here you can see where it is relative to the rest of the darkroom.

I hired local carpenter Jim Shoemaker to do the construction. Here he is putting up the studs.

The wet side of my darkroom is simply an 8-foot section of wall in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't enclose anything; but I needed something to put a counter against, something to hang shelves on, and something I could pound nails into if I wanted to put anything up. Still and all, this is really just a fancy, built-in version of...a table. Don't laugh; I've worked happily in darkrooms where the "wet" side was simply a table with trays on it.

The wall is sheathed on one side with half-inch plywood. Doesn't really need to be, but this way I can pound a brad or screw a screw-hook in anywhere, without having to worry where the studs are.

In this picture the 8' Formica countertop (38" from the floor) has been installed, and Jim is putting up the beadboard.

The finished un-wet wet side. The ventilation intake vent is installed but doesn't yet lead anywhere; we'll get to that eventually. The height of the shelf was also carefully chosen to be just below my standing eye level, so I can see the top of it without straining.

Another view from the opposite corner. The beadboard was a beat-up sheet I've had sitting in the basement for ten years; I think Jim would have preferred I bought new, but, as I explained earlier, I want to fight the impulse to be overly fastidious about this project.

The counter height of 38 inches was very carefully chosen, however. I actually built mock-ups using my kitchen counters until I found just the right height. Reason: I have chronic low-level lower back pain. If it hurts my back at all to stand there rocking trays, I think it would make me use the darkroom less.

Finally, a view of the back side of the wall, showing shelves where I'll store developing equipment and chemicals and so forth. The shelves have been left unattached for now so I can work on the ventilation system.

Next up: power and lighting.

Mike

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We made a lot of progress in die Dunkelkammer over the weekend. Carpenter Jim Shoemaker was here both days and completed most of the wet side—I'll show you that in a few days. In the meantime, here is a brief report of progress on the dry side, mostly in pictures.

Jim bolted two 2x2's to the west wall for me. Here, a section of the wall is taped off for painting.

Painting completed. I didn't worry about all the little voids and pinholes in the concrete—you know what they say, "the perfect is the enemy of gittin' 'er done." Maybe that's not the right expression, but that's what it should be for me.

For the enlarger bench, I'm using the bottom half of a cheap wire shelving unit I bought at Menard's, the local building supply superstore (similar to Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.). It cost $60, made in China (thank you, Chinese persons), and I chose it mainly because it is about the right height and it has adjustable feet, which makes leveling easy. Er. Easier. Anyway, here I'm working on getting it level before putting the top on.

So here's the enlarger bench. For the top, I used an old piece of 2' x 5' butcher block I had stored away. The shelving unit on the left is also a leftover, pilfered from elsewhere in the basement.

Wondering what that black- and cream-colored box on the shelving unit is? It's a paper safe. As you can see it has three shelves, each of which accommodate 11x14" paper (that's some old lightshot 8x10 in it now). The door is hinged on the bottom and has rather stiff springs to hold it shut. Of course it's light-tight.

The reason it's out at this early stage in the construction is this. When I'm standing where it's natural to stand while removing paper from the safe, I like the paper safe to be positioned so that my body is in between it and the direct light from the safelight. A small detail, but exposure is cumulative, more or less, so I like to be conservative when it comes to protecting the assets in the safe.

Finally, I'll tie the tabletop to the wall, via angle-brackets screwed into it and to the 2x2's. Despite the heavy tabletop and the solidity of the wire shelving base, attaching the tabletop securely to the wall is crucial for stability. Before actually doing this, I'm going to wait a few days to let the bench "settle" and then do a last check on the leveling. Here I'm just holding the bracket where it will eventually go, for the picture.

Mike

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This post is dangerous, because I'm jumping the gun a bit and I don't want people to take away the wrong message from this. Remember Johnston's Forum Constraint: "You cannot say anything clearly enough on a camera forum that it cannot be misconstrued." Here's my attempt at clarity:

N.b. (as you probably know, "n.b." means nota bene, Latin for "note well"): I am not recommending this. I might do so in the future, but not yet. So please do not take this post as a recommendation! Yet.

Safelights are a big headache in darkroom work. There really isn't any such thing as a perfect safelight solution, at least not with traditional technology. Many safelights (and texts analyzing and explaining them) were good for older graded papers but don't hold for "newer" VC papers; glass filters are pretty safe in most applications, but they can be dim (most darkrooms that use them have several, located strategically), and they do deteriorate over time; sodium vapor safelights still have their proponents but have tested very poorly for me (and Paul Butzi and, I believe, John Sexton too); and several types of LED-based safelights, which were too expensive to sell in large numbers even when there was a much larger market for darkroom products, have gone out of production.

Anyway, a tastiferous* box arrived via the brown truck today. Inside were two cool Chinese-made LED bulbs from a company called OptiLED: a 2.5-watt Festival Festoon Decolamp, in amber (top), and a .5-watt Festival S11 Decolamp, also in amber (right). They're not actually safelights: they're made for things like Las Vegas signage and to encrust Merry-Go-Rounds. The little one appears to be too dim to be of much use for our nonstandard purposes, but the larger one is promising. The graph of its output, which I saw during my far-flung 'net research but can't seem to find again, is a sharp-cutting spike at 590 nm. (Wish I could find that graph again...). 

So is it really sharp-cutting? Here's the thing about safelights: you have to test. Really, the "safe" in safelight is a misnomer: all safelights are unsafe for certain levels of illumination combined with certain durations of exposure. The trick is accurately finding out where those limits are...for your materials in your space given your working methods. In due course (i.e., once I'm set up to test this one), I'll write a post on testing safelights. The takeaway here should be that it's got to be done. A must. Baseline B&W darkroom craftsmanship. Ctein, for example, guesses this Festoon should be safe. Paul guesses it won't be. (If it isn't, I ain't dead in the water: there's also a red one, with output centered at 627 nm.) The point is, I can't take their guesses for gospel, and you can't take mine. We all gotta test our own.

Ponce de Leon
Even though I don't know whether it works yet, the OptiLED has a lot of allure. It's so wetproof it can be used outdoors; it will operate at any temperature from —30 to 70 degrees C (that's –22 to 158 degrees F), which pretty much encompasses all the temperatures I expect to encounter in my basement; it's made of fire-resistant polymers; it draws only 2.5 watts from the wall; and it's rated to last for 35,000 hours of use, which is more time than even I have spent in darkrooms in my entire life so far. And it's so nice in the darkroom space in the basement that I could really get by quite comfortably with only one.

Of course, allure can mislead. Ponce de Leon considered the Fountain of Youth so alluring that he wasted a large stretch of his limited lifespan looking for it, and we all know how that turned out. Just because something is appealing doesn't mean it isn't also too good to be true. So we test. More anon.

Mike

* Perfectly cromulent word if you ask me.

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Featured Comment by Mark Roberts: "I don't care if it works or not—anything called 'Festoon' is a must-have for my darkroom!"

Mike replies: I agree, the name is a big plus. <g>

Featured Comment by Kerstin: "I'm so far out of it that the last safelight I had I made myself. It was a small light bulb (about the size of the LED, I think), and I painted it red with nail polish."

Featured Comment by bongo: "Looks great. Thanks for the recommendation."

Okay, I realize it still doesn't look like much. But if you'll compare it to the "before" picture (right—click to embiggen), you'll see I've gotten a lot done—removed all the junk, swept the cobwebs off the ceiling, removed or reattached the stuff hanging from the ceiling, and, mostly, cleaned the floor and gave it a couple of coats of floor enamel. That was harder than it sounds, because, before I fixed the house drainage (new gutters and Roto-Rooting the drain to the sewer), the floor repeatedly flooded over the years and stuff that was left out got wet, dried, and stuck to the floor. I spent a lot of time on my knees with a scraper and a wire brush and various buckets full of cleaning potions. 

The painted area is a little bigger than 10x13', by the way.

Oops! Once you get to working it's hard to stop. Thought I'd black out the windows at 2:00 a.m. and forgot, briefly, that blue masking tape isn't opaque. It's best to black out windows when it's light outside. I'll talk more about lightproofing when  get around to doing it.

I also installed splitters on all the light sockets in the basement. This one shows a compact fluorescent bulb, which won't be what I'll use for white lighting, and an older Adorama LED safelight (no longer available), which I won't be using either—we'll talk about lighting in the future, too. The splitter arrangement, made out of cheap parts from the hardware store, is what I wanted to show here. The extensions are just to get the pull chains, which, obviously, allow you to select the safelight or the white light. I've seen 1-to-2 bulb-socket fixtures that already have pull chains built in, but I couldn't find any this time. (Should have looked online—I didn't think of that.)

Another nifty trick I've used in the past is to get a long chain extension and run it through eyelets attached to the joist. That allows you to reach up and turn on the white lights from wherever you're standing. I don't think I'll do that in this darkroom, but I thought I'd mention it.

Finally, I can't resist—my friend Jack McDonough sent me the picture below of his basement "darkroom." Classic. 

Mike

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Well, I was afraid of this: I'm afraid I'm just going to bore the pants off people for a while as I maunder on about darkroom stuff. What can I say? It's where I am.

Walls
Anyway, paint: there is a deathless myth which holds that darkrooms need to be painted black. Not so. Darkrooms should be white. At least, black-and-white darkrooms should be. Why? First, for the same reason that white is the most common color for any interior room: it makes a room seem brighter and larger and makes it a more pleasant place to be. Black walls cut down on the reflection of stray light—for instance, light leaks from the enlarger. But here's what you should do if your enlarger has light leaks: fix it.

The darkrooms that really need to be painted black are group darkrooms, such as school darkrooms...which is where most people get their ideas about what darkroom are supposed to look like (which explains the myth). And why should group darkrooms be painted black? Because more than one person works in them at a time, and, when more than one person is working, light contamination is unavoidable. In gang darkrooms there are always those unsociable individuals who open their enlargers to insert the carrier with the enlarger turned on, or (worse) use the light from the opened enlarger to see to do some other task, but even if everybody's being responsible there can still be someone focusing or exposing when someone else is walking past with exposed paper. With all sorts of unruly white light bouncing around the room, that's when you need black paint slathered over everything, even though it makes the place look like a medieval dungeon or the inside of a House of Horrors. But just because gang darkrooms are black doesn't mean all darkrooms should be.

The other reason white is the right color is that it greatly increases the efficiency of your safelights. Safelight is brighter and easier to see by when it can reflect off white walls and ceilings. Plus, greater safelight efficiency means you might need fewer of them.

My walls are sort of a dingy yellowish off-white. Based on all the stuff attached to the walls over the paint, I'm going to guess they were last painted in 1957 when the house was built. In the interest of KISS and speedy construction I'm not going to repaint. But if I did, they'd be white.

Floor
If your floor is concrete, as mine is, paint it.

Why? Again, simple. Concrete is porous. Darkrooms with unpainted concrete floors tend to get doused over time with lots of little spills and splashes and maybe (if you're unlucky) a very occasional large one. A little bit of every spill soaks into the floor, and after a while the darkroom starts to smell. Painting the floor, wiping up spills, and mopping every now and then just makes the space a little more pleasant over the long haul.

Mike

UPDATE: Paul Butzi points out that reflected light from the paper, during exposure can reflect off nearby white surfaces and degrade highlights, which I accept. So any areas directly adjacent to the enlarger should be...all right, painted black. Paul suggests using light-absorbing black fabric for your tests. He also suggests printing in a black shirt! That's one I've never heard before, but okay. Maybe that's why some of the best custom printers are New Yorkers.

UPDATE No. 2: Bought myself three black shirts at the K-Mart, on sale for $5.98 each. Plan to keep them in the basement.

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In the times when photographers who wanted to work and weren't rich had to have what my friend Nick Hartmann once called "The room-sized accessory"—a darkroom—extemporizing was the order of the day. People worked in every conceivable kind of space: under stairs, in extra bedrooms, closets, basements, utility rooms in office building basements—the list is as long as your arm. Many such spaces and setups were just preposterously awful, some almost to the point of parody, or hilarity.

I've gotten interested in this notion of "reverse snobbery" that came up the other day, and I do think I've always considered it a point of pride that I could work anywhere. I've worked in some nice darkrooms over the years, but I've definitely worked in some horrible ones, too—dank, smelly, ancient, cluttered, cobwebbed spaces where it would be considered cruel to confine a cat. The only darkroom I ever put together that really didn't work was in the dressing area and bathroom of a one-room studio apartment I lived in in Washington, D.C. It was cramped, awkwardly laid-out, hot, and airless—too hair-shirt even for me.

Of course, the opposite impulse sometimes prevails: people get to jonesing to build the "perfect" darkroom, custom fit to them and with everything designed exquisitely just so.

As regular readers know, I edited a photo magazine for a number of years. It was called Photo Techniques, but its previous title was Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques (D&CCT), and before that (before the publisher acquired Creative Camera) it was called Darkroom Techniques. It was one of two darkroom magazines founded within a couple of years of 1979, the year that the home darkroom hobby in the U.S. peaked. The other title was Darkroom Photography. (Ironically, I had a hand in changing the names of both of those darkroom magazines to remove the word "darkroom" from their titles.) Anyway, the magazine I edited was still essentially a darkroom magazine when I was there, so I saw a steady stream of "perfect darkroom" articles. Some of these creations were state-of-the-art in having the latest and best of everything; some deployed cutting-edge technologies (remember Minolta's 45A pulsed-xenon enlarger head?); some were lovingly crafted with furniture-grade custom cabinetry and multiple coats of glossy paint. One was so over the top that we ran a series of articles on it in the magazine. I wish I could recall the name of the author or the articles off the top of my head, but that information is not bobbing to the surface.*

Then, in about my fourth year on the job, I began to notice a trend: people who built "perfect" darkrooms tended not to use them very much. This was a purely empirical observation. I'd contact people I know had been passionately engaged in months-long building projects and ask them how they were liking their pride-and-joy. And again and again the same answer came back: don't really get down there as often as I'd like; it's great, but I just haven't had time; work situation changed; family obligations; so forth. Finally, several years after we ran the article about the over-the-top darkroom—really, the most elaborate home darkroom I'd ever heard of—I contacted the author.

He'd moved.

He had tried to dismantle as much of the darkroom as he could, if I recall the conversation correctly, but the effort hadn't really proved satisfactory. I do remember him telling me that he had realized at some point that the building project itself was what had really interested him, not actually having the finished facility in which to do photographic work. 

Reverse snobbery maybe, but that cemented my preference for plain, unadorned, utilitarian, workmanlike spaces. Don't build too much in; let the joists and studs show; never be afraid to hammer a nail into a wall. Make do with what you have. You never want it to be so set that you can't rig it some other way if you feel like it. If something's less than ideal, shrug and get on with it. It's just a utility room, not a work of art in itself.

Extemporizing, often merely necessary, can also be a virtue. 

Mike

* Maybe it's in the famous Grad Photographica Bibliotheca, either the one of paper and shelves or the one of gray matter and synapses.

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Featured Comment by Chris Nicholls: "Lots of nostalgia going on here, but some of us are living the dream! And at least in part thanks to the inspiration found in your stories Mike. I completed my first darkroom last Christmas, and have been locked away in there on a pretty regular basis ever since. No time for perfection in the build, and plenty of unfinished timber on show! Take a look!"

Chris Nicholls' darkroom

Featured Comment by Paul: "Our flat has three bedrooms, the kids' room, my wife and I share the other room, and my studio. The studio is a darkroom with all the equipment set up all day long, it also holds the digital side where I'm slowly printing less and less on my Epson printer. I write my little blog in this room on a old IBM laptop and my kids enjoy doing their homework in this room also. Under the kitchen worktop which goes round half the room I've got a few cupboards and draws, some without doors on and others with. I couldn't give a crap if it isn't beautiful; I come in here to create with the least effort possible. My wife has a love-hate relationship with this room because it's sometimes quite untidy but it's always when I'm at my most creative. Anyway she's got the rest of the house to carry out whatever she feels like.

"The room also contains seven electric guitars, a 150 watt head and 50 watt combo amplifier.

"This room isn't open to all visitors who appear round our house, it's a sacred place where a lot of feelings come out. I'm not at all religious in the standard sense but it's sort of our little 'church.' For my little kids and I it's an escape from the real world.

"My pitbull and the chihuahua sleep under the table which holds the enlarger and they've got the lounge, kitchen, dinning room and terraces to choose from but there seems to be a lot of peace in here. A friend of mine says it's very spiritual in here, I just think it's cool.

"The only advice, I can give to anyone is that room you create whether it's a lightroom or a darkroom, it must welcome you every time you step foot inside to create. If not you will soon notice you're not printing very much or perhaps there is something more interesting on the television. I've always had a studio in every house or flat I've lived in, since I discovered at the age of eight I had a compulsion to create, so I sort of know what I'm talking about."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "These discussions remind me of something the poet Allen Ginsberg talked about. He had some expensive, fine notebooks to write his poetry in, but preferred 'cheapo' notebooks, as he called them. He was less inhibited by a .49 cent book than a hand-tooled Italian leather book. Freed his mind and creativity to just scribble. Some masterpieces arose from that."