Darkroom!

I've started a darkroom. It's something I've always wanted to do I suppose, but now seemed the time to do it for some reason. Ok. So it's not a proper darkroom, but then again it's not just a dark room... It's a darkroom built for pinhole camera photography! But how does one take photos with a pinhole camera?! It turns out it's actually reasonably simple. The basic principle is as follows. An image is formed in a pinhole camera just as in any other camera so all you have to do is put some film in the right place. The standard darkroom process involves developing your film, then putting the negatives you've just made into an enlarger, projecting them onto photographic paper and then developing the paper. On the film, parts struck by light become dark. The same is true of photographic paper so during the process, the colours are inverted twice, giving you the original again. So, everything is peachy. Well actually no. Enlargers are *really* expensive (the cheapest one I found was about 160 pounds without an enlarging lens, timer easel etc etc etc...). Setting up a darkroom was therefore going to be out of the question. Until I saw podcast about pinhole photography. All you do is stick a pin in a box. Then you have a pinhole camera. So how do you take the photo? Actually, the process is exactly the same as for film except instead of using film, you use photographic paper and instead of using an enlarger, you contact print. For a grand total of 30 pounds I was all set. Watching photos appear is perhaps the coolest thing I've seen for a long time. Highly recommended. To see the podcast, check out: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/08/make_video_podcast_weekend_pro_1.html There are lots of other cool things on the site. I find that actually, his design isnt' all that great. The best thing I've tried so far is a beer can as the container with a hole punched in the side.