Lets See Your Darkroom

[mhulsman]

This is my small (3x2 meter) darkroom in the cellar under my house.
Eddie Gunks has seen it last week, and has seen the L1200 enlarger from above.
I removed the fixed stairs to the cellar to setup my L1200

[jp]

Some of these photos inspired me to make a few minor improvements to my darkroom.

Just built a new shelf and re-wired my print drying lines. You can never have enough storage.

[ThePhilosopher]

I only do developing, the CPP-2+ w/Lift are in the tub behind me. Tons more chemicals under the sink in the cabinet.

[Brian K]

I take quite a bit of pride in my darkroom as it took a lot of planning and resources to set up. My darkroom consists of 2 rooms, wet and dry. The dry room stores prints and negatives, paper and gear. Both rooms are fire hardened utilizing concrete walls and floors, doubled layers of fire-x sheet rock, fire rated doors and vents. It also has radiant heat, hospital grade fine particulate and VOC filtering, and a dehumidification/heat pump/AC in addition to the central heating/cooling.

The fire rated doors have the added benefit of being light tight. So I can use the dry darkroom as a light trap so I can come and go from the wet room at will, or just leave the door between open to access other materials. It is in the dry room that I mount negatives in the negative carrier.

The negatives are stored in 3 hour rated fire safes. While media vaults would be superior, they provide little in storage area for their size and weight and I felt that by creating a fire hardened, ground level room that was as far from the most common sources of house fires with fire rated flooring and partitions between, that I could compensate for the lower protection offered by the non media vault safes. Above the safes are the print drying racks.

The wet room has 23 linear feet of sinks, a Jobo, a pair of Durst L-184 enlargers with motorized focus (a must for big prints), and en extensive water filtering system. The system includes at point of entry a 5 micron sediment filter, water softener, a .5 micron carbon filter and then finally another .5 micron particle filter at the point of use. Temperature regulation is provided by a Hass intellifaucet.

Mounting, matting and spotting takes place in the studio.

[Brian K]

Here's a few more pics

[ic-racer]

Now I know what the guys with the little bathroom darkrooms feel like...

I never thought much about the fire risk. Is this darkroom in a suburban home or a city commercial building?

Two 8x10s, wow. I now feel like I was wrong to keep repeating to myself "only one 8x10 enlarger" when I recently traveled to pick up a CLS head. I had to leave its chassis behind

[Fred L]

for the love of humanity, enough with the torture already. photos of brian's darkroom is salt in the wound

[bobwysiwyg]

I've been checking these. Darkrooms, eh, more like dark palaces me thinks. Nice digs guys.

[jp]

Don't be jealous. Yeh, I'd made mine a little bigger if my house were a little less multi-purpose.

But, I'd used bigger darkrooms in college, with separated dry/wet areas, numerous enlargers, lots of space, had the whole place to myself most of the time.

It's not all pure awesomeness. Bigger was just more places to misplace stuff in the dark, I gravitated to a particular enlarger and stuck with it, I only used a portion of the sink area, etc...

So, I think there's a happy medium to strive for. I think that will differ based on people's uses of the darkroom, volumes, print sizes, organizational skills, budget, so on.

My theory on this is based on garage ownership. I have a garage that is really big, but it's disorganized, and the sheer space doesn't make me a better car owner/enthusiast than someone with a 1-2 car garage.

I don't have any particular or unusual methods of preventing fire damage to my negatives. I keep the ones I don't use regularly in my detached garage, which is not occupied, thus less risk. I also keep a hard drive of all my digital images (mostly dslr images and some scans) offsite. I suppose if a fire destroyed my house, I would not lose any digital images, I would lose none of my historical negatives (from previous decades), and I would lose recent negatives that had not been scanned, or I had not gotten around to printing. I could improve on that by scanning some of the recent negatives, or keeping prints offsite with my hard drives.

[willwilson]

Brian, that is a ridiculously nice darkroom!!! Did you have it built or DIY?

I don't know if I would like having to walk so far to drop a print in the tray though? How is that?

I am working on getting my darkroom out of the basement but until then its cold, damp, and low ceiling for me...First shot is wet side: sink on left then chemical storage shelf then tray holding table. Second shot is dry side Elwood 8x10 on the left and my omega D3 with color head in the middle.