Accountability and a bit of history.

This post was partly inspired by Steve’s over at https://photieplace.wordpress.com/2025/05/04/not-intentional/

Check his blog out, the images are wonderful and his writing thoughtful.

I’ve been taking pictures with intention since 2010, and playing with film photography since 2016.

Like many I grew up before the digital age, but I didn’t learn photography or have a basic understanding until 2010. I had messed around with my parents point and shoot, and remember going to the pharmacy to get my rolls developed. I even still have a roll from 6th form shot through an older APS format PaS.

In 2005, I bought a Zenit E off eBay for £3 but I didn’t understand how light meters worked and I was too impatient to learn. This meant the one and only roll I ran through it was completely blown out and I lost interest. Annoyingly I wish I still had that camera, I left it in a share house when I moved more permanently to Australia in 2011.

Learning the basics with a digital camera allowed me to see my failures almost instantly and improved my technical abilities fairly quickly. There really is something to be said for learning how to take a good image with digital then transferring across. If anything, the immediate feedback of digital makes life so much easier! That being said, analogue is a whole different ball game when it comes to developing and printing but the basics and science of light remain the same.

After learning to take images properly with digital camera my wife bought me an EOS33 for my 30th, which sparked a love of the analogue process. I’m pretty sure she regrets that decision now as it’s lead to me buying darkroom equipment and trying to set up a darkroom in every house we have lived in since.

I even shipped my enlarger back from the UK which I bought for £50 mid 2017 and it’s my most prized possession. (Side note, after 2011, I moved with wife to the UK beginning of 2017-2022).

This is a long winded way of me saying that I’ve only really been printing for 8 years or so and have a heck of a lot to learn. I’m also using the blog as a way to enforce or hold me to account and to keep printing.

My current darkroom is the laundry where I block out the window during the day or use a blockout curtain at night. Due to the cold weather during the winter I have resorted to using a tray warmer, which is basically a home brew heat pad. Works well, and my attempt to not use it in 9C weather was…sub optimal. I couldn’t get my paper to develop to completion even after 5 minutes in the tray. I’m a millennial, 5 minutes is an eternity. The tray warmer solved that problem instantly. Although I am planning an extension and building a garage which will include (my wife has relented) a proper darkroom.

But for now, I will continue in the laundry darkroom, the Camera club darkroom or the community darkroom near my house. As for the blog, the aim is to publish often (I’m hoping weekly) where possible. That being said, I am about to have child number 2 which will likely dramatically reduce my spare time like having child 1 did. It’ll mostly be about my prints, my explorations and my journey into darkroom printing. I hope people will find it useful, but it is not really its intent. I’m not a printing master, at 8 years I’m still very new to it. But I certainly know my way around a darkroom and know enough to know that I don’t know enough.

Feel free to comment, tell me what you like, what you dislike or where you think I could improve.