The Traditional Photographic Processes

The traditional photographic process that has become less common as digital photography has taken the world by storm with its convenience, however they're still found on educational facilities and professional photographers' studios. The steps to developing photographs in a dark room requires some knowledge beforehand.

After you've snapped some photographs on film you should develop them so that you can have individual sheets of whatever you shot.

The first step is to get your negatives from the film. A negative is a mirrored image of the photograph, except where the lightest parts of the shot are it would actually be the darkest parts in the final product. An easy way to explain this is that if I took a photograph on film of a white sheet, the negative of that would be black.

To get that image onto photographic paper, you would need an enlarger, developer, fixer, stop.

These are typical equipment within a darkroom, the first step to getting a final print is to take the film out of the roll without damaging it by extracting it in complete darkness. Then the negative is put into a solution that sets the image onto the plastic and then you can take it out into light.

The enlarger is where you put the negative sheet into between the light source of the enlarger and it is projected onto a photographic paper. Depending on the exposure time you leave the image to project onto the paper will be the final result. Once it is up to satisfaction, you take the sheet away from the enlarger and place the sheet in developer.

Developer is a solution bath that typically consists of ethanol and water. This helps to bring out the image that was exposed onto the sheet, this would usually take a minute or two.

Next you move onto the stop bath which is another solution. This could consist of just water to wash the chemicals off, however this method will leave minute traces of the developer and this could affect the final result of the image. Another way to stop bath is to neutralise it with acetic acid or citric acid and this would immediately stop the developer as it is an alkaline solution. Both acids need to be diluted with water as it could cause chemical burns.

After the stop bath you move the paper to a fixer bath, this is usually an alkaline solution and it sets the image onto the sheet so that light and such doesn't affect it anymore after leaving the darkroom.