Darkroom developing11/3/2023 ![]() In future weeks, I will write about some experiences and the techniques I have learned (or relearned) and share a selection of the images I have made. I enrolled in the B&W Darkroom Techniques course, run by George Webber at SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) and had the first class last week. After getting some rolls processed in Calgary by Paul Stack and scanning myself, my desire to develop my own film grew. And then, last year, I bought a Leica M6 and Canon EOS 1V. Like many photographers, I switched from analog to digital: from SLR (Zenit-E and Yashica) to DSLR (Canon and Fujifilm). Taking sequences of photographs was part of the gathered evidence for the research program. And then the light went out until the gas was stopped, then it would return. Large vats of this organism would glow boldly in the dark until exposed to an anaesthetic gas called halothane. In brief, making the lights glow involves a compound called luciferin, which is oxidized in a reaction involving luciferase, an enzyme. ![]() David White was investigating the molecular mechanisms of anaesthesia using Photobacterium phosphoreum, a marine bacterium that exhibits bioluminescence. The connection between research and darkroom labs is an interesting one. That was at the Clinical Research Centre (CRC), a facility in Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, London, not too far away from the largest Kodak factory in the UK (It survived with film production until 2016.) I worked at CRC for a year before completing my undergraduate degree in Applied Biology. Some of the skills are there in my memories, and there are negatives and prints tucked away in shoe boxes to remind me of the time I was trained to develop and process black & white images. I haven’t worked in a photographic darkroom for more than four decades.
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