Let's Take it up a Notch

 
I’ve been photographing since 2011 and I’ve shot many (and I mean many) cameras. And even though I feel super confident with most cameras and the work I can create with them, I wanna take it up a notch. 

   How do I take it to the next level? I’ve sat and thought about it for weeks and I came to this conclusion — the darkroom. It’s been almost 10 years (that’s crazy) since I’ve been in the darkroom & printed anything, but sometimes you gotta go back to ya roots. Luckily for me, sawtooth has a darkroom right by my office. so with that being said, I’m back in da trap. 

Why the darkroom? 

   I have a couple of photographers that I like but one that I like the most in terms of final product and how he renders color is Quentin De Briey. Since 2013 I’ve been following his work and trying to figure out how he gets the colors & texture out of his film and it took me forever to be honest. Examples of his work below:

 But what I realized was it was hand-printing the photos and scanning them back in (just my hypothesis) and the color comes out crazy. and his black & white looks crazy too. With that being said, I’m back in the darkroom. The main plan is to master darkroom printing in black and white at sawtooth, then learn color printing. Once I get comfortable at that, I want to build myself a color darkroom somewhere. Ideally I would build it somewhere on the eastside and make it a community darkroom. But, I gotta take it 1 step at a time . 

What’s the next plan of action?

   The darkroom that sawtooth has is only a black & white darkroom so I need to start shooting black & white film. The camera of choice for this is going to be my Leica M4 with the newly acquired 35mm f2 summicron. It’s a little harder to buy film out here in Winston, but once I get my money right I’ll buy a brick or two of tmax 100. I’m keeping it around 100iso because I still want to practice zone focusing and street photography in general and Kodak Portra 160 is usually my film of choice. Now I don’t know if I’ll be able to develop film in there but if I can’t, I’ll need to go ahead and grab all the items to develop film at the office. I hope I can though.

Items I need to grab 

   Outside of taking photos on b&w I don’t really have too many items that I need to grab. I need paper to print on since they provide everything else, and I need a journal that’s dedicated to the darkroom. Maybe one of those leather bound ones that have like 3 different journals in it. Now that I’m thinkin about it, I might have to get a custom one of those. anyways, once I get those two items (atleast the paper first) I’ll be good to go. If you wanna follow my darkroom journey I will be documenting it and I’ll probably put a YouTube video/series up so you can see what’s going on. but in the meantime you can see it on my personal account on threads [make threads a link to my account] where I’ll share some photos here or there. 

-TS

p.s. if you took time out of your day to read this in its entirety, I appreciate you & it means a lot to me mane *100it emoji*