How to Construct Your Own Darkroom

Federico Alegría
5 min readJan 12, 2021
Image by Paul A. Hernandez

Film photography came to my life after knowing several of the nuts and bolts of digital photography, at least at a serious level. When I was a kid I remember going with my parents to the lab and waiting for a couple of days in order to actually see the photos. I also remember their warnings (mostly yellings) about being careful of not leaving any fingerprint in the photos, so I always handled them with extreme care.

Even when living in the digital imagery age, film photography can still give us a lot of valuable experiences. Personally speaking, it has taught me to think more about my frames in a sort of “image economy” sense with this simple formula:

Shooting the frames is one thing, and is basically just like doing it with a digital camera with a broken screen. As long as you know how light gets captured by a camera, you can use pretty much any photographic gear in the world. That is why I consider film photography to be just another format rather than a genre.

Processing film is a magnificent experience, and is something any photographer should try at least once, it is almost like magic. There are two main stages when it comes to developing film. The first one relates to actually being able to see something in the emulsion, this is called the “film development” stage, and the other big one in the workflow is the “printing process”.

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