How to photograph your darkroom

Every darkroom is different from the others. For a better viewing experience, we ask everyone to take the first three main photos the same way: same light and same framing.

  1. Example: the dry side with the enlarger, photographed from the front under white light✓ Landscape 4:3

    01

    Shoot in landscape

    Hold your phone in landscape. If your darkroom is large, use a wide-angle lens, even a very wide one, but stay facing the enlarger baseboard. The dashed frame shows the crop that will appear on your page, in 4:3 or 16:9. Once you've uploaded a photo, you can widen the crop and adjust it as you like.

  2. Example: the dry side with the enlarger, photographed from the front under white lightWhite light
    Example: the same view of the dry side under the safelightSafelight

    02

    Dry side, with white light and with safelight

    Stand in front of the enlarger baseboard and use a tripod for these two shots. The first with the white light on, the second from the same spot with only the safelight on. On your page a switch flips from one light to the other, and anyone looking will see your darkroom as if from where you stand.

  3. Example: the wet side with the trays, photographed from the frontWet side

    03

    Wet side

    Then move in front of the trays and shoot, still in landscape. If the sink is long, you can shoot it at an angle. It doesn't matter whether you're in a bathroom or in your own purpose-built darkroom. Photograph the area where you work with the chemistry.

  4. Example: the person who uses the darkroom, at workWho prints here

    04

    Who prints here

    It's the photo we care about most, because it's lovely to see who lives in darkrooms! Take a portrait of yourself or of your team in the darkroom.

  5. Example: a detail of the darkroomDetail

    05

    Details, your way

    Photograph one or more details: a print holder, your enlarger, your precious bottles of platinum or the handmade cabinet where you keep your negatives. To you they're familiar objects; to someone arriving, they're a way to understand your world better.

We delete all GPS data from your photos.

Here are all the steps we take:
  1. Most of the time the photo is shrunk on your phone before it's sent, and in that step the EXIF data, including the GPS location, is already removed.
  2. If the photo does arrive at full size, we take the EXIF and GPS data and throw it away, keeping only the clean image.
  3. Then we compress it to WebP, a lighter format: it's the only file we save for the site on inmydarkroom.com.
  4. We never save the original file: we read it in memory and, once the upload is done, we delete it without keeping any copy.
  5. So your original file and your GPS location are never saved, on the site or anywhere else.