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Light-proofing a room for use as darkroom
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I’m trying to set up a darkroom at the moment. It’s going to be in a big airy garage that lets in quite a lot of light. I was going to use a whole load of black plastic bags as there are a lot of light leaks but wanted to see if anyone else finds anything else useful.
In my dark-shed I built a wall of wooden sheets inside the shed itself and filled the gaps with plaster.
Tell us more about the leaks, how big and what types of surface?
Well there’s the window and under the door- which should be straight forward.
The garage door – which looks like it might be a bit of a challenge as it is a big double door with plenty of gaps
The roof (corrugated iron) and other small enough light leaks totaling about 5 – 10 leaks I think.You could use a heavy curtain across the door. For the roof, I would be thinking of fixing polystyrene sheets to it, to keep down the heat and to make it more light-tight.
Your local curtain supplier probably has blackout lining – it’s pretty well light
proof but creamy coloured and not too heavy to bend around things. May
be worth a go. (If you go to http://www.johngallen.co.uk they’ll send a swatch
with any free fabric samples you order – I know cos I wrote the website).The material Pete recommends is available down south from Hickeys or similar. You can use double sided tape if you want a permanent blackout or treat it as curtain on a rail for a less permanent job. The less setting up you have to do in a darkroom the better so make it as permanent as possible so you can go straight in and print. Good luck with it. Show us a photo when you have it set up.
This stuff is pretty good when used over a door. I use if over a window that has a panel of wood inserted over the glass and just leaks some light.
http://www.silverprint.co.uk/dark16.html
I’ve spent all day putting in another sink, we should start a thread for showing our darkrooms.
Good luck with this, hope it goes well! I would just love a darkroom, I have a little space that I use for processing film but not printing (not yet anyway!). I didn’t use anything to black it out as it is pretty dark, well at night it is anyway last film I did was during the day and half of it was un-useable as it was fogged up :( So maybe a good idea would be just to switch the light off and see how dark it is before doing any work in there.
Good Luck!
Sinead.
Sinead you should buy yourself a film changing bag, they are reasonably cheap and you can load your tanks daylight.
Fintan makes a good point about the Changing bag for film – it’s not worth taking a risk in a make-shift darkroom. Gunns in Dublin stock them as we also have them in Cork. I built a few darkrooms, one in a shed and one in an attic. The shed broke my heart – even plastering and filling everything I could think of there was always some light coming in – even from the (raised) floor on a right moonlight night! The attic was much better, but do yourself a favour and insulate it well. One of the advantages of an attic is the availability of water for film and print washing, although I must admit I never got around to plumbing mine, I just brought up a camping drum of water and a bucket to bring prints down to the bathroom for washing later. If the Darkroom can be semi-permanent condiser adhesive backet velcro for attaching your light-proofing material to window and door frames.
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