Darkroom Anomalies

These past few days I've been packing my life away into boxes in effort to get ready for my second year at RISD. Admittedly, I am not the most organized person by nature, so n the course of all this cleaning and packing, I've also been finding a lot of things that had been either lost or forgotten. Among some of the things found was a rather large collection of test strips and printing errors.

For those unfamiliar, test stripping is a crucial part of the photographic printing process -- a process by which the printer exposes photographic paper for small increments of time in order to discern the amount of time needed to properly expose the paper.

The testing process produces a large amount of waste material, as often several pieces of photo paper may be necessary to determine the proper exposure. This is where things can get interesting. Often test prints are not fully developed and are generally discarded after brief examination, allowing for strange things to happen chemically on the print.

This print was not floated properly in the developing bath, and as you can see, the paper failed to come in uniform contact with the chemicals and developed at several different rates.

Another strange thing that happens: this print was neither placed into a stop bath or fixer before discarded, meaning that after being thrown away, developing continued to occur. The print has brown chemical stains on it from being exposed to light in the darkroom.

Back in high school I used to frequent the darkroom during my free periods. Every other day or so I would rifle through the trash bin looking for some interesting looking discolored or strange prints, run them through a stop bath and fixer, and then allow them to dry. Though these anomalies are often things that go unnoticed in the darkroom as emphasis is often placed on the finished print, they are possibly one of the more interesting products of the photographic process and deserve some level of inspection for their own artistic merits.