Remembering Darkroom Days and Nights

 

   The term for today is disruptive technology. It means that new technology changes or disrupts what we know.  Take the typewriter, for example. No nostalgia can convince us to give up our computer keyboards and bring back the white-out correction fluid. The personal computer slowly killed the typewriter and not many people put up a fight.

   The same is true in photography. Digital cameras gradually improved year by year and before we realized it, our film cameras were obsolete. If you don’t believe me, try finding a roll of film.  In the days of Plus-X and Kodachrome, I carried a dozen rolls of film on vacation. I now have just one roll in the familiar plastic film container to remember “the good old days.”

   The good old days for me started in 1970 when I received a Kodak Instamatic Camera with flashcube for Christmas. Kodak introduced the auto loading camera in 1963 and sold 50 million of them by 1970.  The cost of film and processing slowed me down but I fell in love with photography.  My first official photography role was as the Boy Scout Troop 22 photographer – a title I claimed after earning the prestigious photography merit badge.

   A few years later I joined the high school yearbook staff and was introduced to “real” film cameras that our private school could afford. There was the Leica camera that may have come home with a GI from WWII and an ancient Yashica-Mat format camera that may have previously been used by Jimmy Olsen.

   The cameras were unimportant. The fun was working in the darkroom.  I logged hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in darkrooms through high school, college and later work. Like a chain smoker, I carried the strong smell of chemicals like D-76, Dektol and acetic acid on my fingertips and clothes everyday.  Darkroom work was rewarding and fun but inefficient. 

   Franchises like Fotomat began offering low cost film processing and soon you could drop off your film at Target, shop and pick up your prints on the way out. The darkroom days were numbered but not dead until the digital camera appeared. Invented in 1975, digital camera sales boomed in the late 1990’s when the quality caught up with standard film cameras and costs came down.

   I was reminded of those good old darkroom days this past week when I came across “vintage darkroom equipment” listed on Ebay.  For only $50 you could get an enlarger, reels, trays, and a snappy red light.  That is a bargain if you are interested in taking up photo processing as a hobby. Vinyl records are making a comeback – maybe darkrooms are next.  The whole thing is a bit depressing when I see my old darkroom equipment listed as vintage.

   My darkroom days are over but I have boxes of old black and white prints to remind me of those many afternoons in the high school darkroom.  Today, no darkroom skills are needed to process smart phone pictures.  People can literally shoot, edit and send high quality photos with one finger and that finger won’t be stained with photo chemicals. Now that’s progress.