Hi all,
I've been asked to shoot of video of the process of printing black and white photos in a darkroom. The video should show the images developing in the developer tray. Unfortunately, I cannot add any lights, not even additional red lights, as the darkroom where I need to shoot will be shared by other people.

Has anyone here ever attempted something like this? Is this even possible?
I have a canon 60D. My fastest lens is the plastic fantastic (50 1.8).
Should I rent a faster lens? Will an infrared modified body help out in any way?

Any help and suggestion greatly appreciated, thanks.

I've seen footage like this, but I don't know how it was done. A couple of things occurred to me:

When I used to do B&W 35mm D&P the safelights for printing were more yellow than red;
you would have to be careful that any LEDs and the LCD on your camera didn't leak non-safe light.

Can you get a chance to try out filming in the darkroom with just the safelight without anyone else there?
At least you would find out if you can capture any images at all.
Oh, and focussing will likely be a real b*gg*r. :-)

Thanks Colin.
Yes you right, safelights for B&W are apparently amber not red, as it seems from doing a bit more research.
Never done any darkroom work in my life, unfortunately ;)
Also good point about blocking stray light from the video camera itself.

I'm trying to find out from the darkroom operators if it's at all possible to add additional safelights to the darkroom. If not, I will make a test with the fastest lens I can get and high iso, and see if the results are acceptable.

However, since each darkroom session costs money (of course), and since deadline for completion of this project is close, I was hoping maybe someone has an ingenious idea about shooting video in darkroom before I make my first test at the end of this week...

cheers

The only time I've done a darkroom sequence, we faked it. It was shot on film, so it was a while ago.

Having other people using the darkroom is rather inconvenient.

Yes fake it and have the narrator explain why.

You could inject some humour into it .. start then turn all the lights out to emphasis why they call it a 'darkroom.'

Cheers.

Yes, fake it!

As I recall, the image comes up from white to b&w over a 2-minute period or so.

I would find a way to do the establishing shots with good light in the darkroom - will they give you a reduced rate for exclusive use at midnight-4am? Then, a 10-second dissolve from white to b&w on a locked-off shot, with a legend that says "elapsed time = 2 minutes" or some such.

Shooting something like this in a shared working environment where other people reasonably expect to be productive is crazy talk, in my opinion. It's just going to hurt relationships with fellow photogs, and the facility.

Guys, thanks. Unfortunately, faking it is not an option in this case. This is not a narrative/documentary, the black and white image appearing on the white paper is exactly what the artist doing this project is interested in capturing, not the darkroom surroundings or happenings. If we cannot manage to get decent footage of this process, we'll probably scrap the project entirely.

We will not be doing anything without the darkroom operators' permission, but your point is a valid one, Seth. We're doing our best to find a time slot to have the darkroom for ourselves, or at the very least a secluded part of it so that we don't disturb/get disturbed by other users.

What I'm still trying to figure out is if there is any specialized camera I can rent that would be better suited for the task than my 60D.

Would a small handicam (or I think also a canon xf100 has it) with that night vision gimmick don't do the trick? But I guess it will transmit unsafe light as well to see in the dark.

I had an old Sony Hi8 camcorder with that gimmick. Don't remember how it works, if it emits any light.
Not really the look we're going for, but if nothing else works I may give it a try if it doesn't emit any light.

You can always replace that green colour with any other in post or just turn it to black and white, I just remembered that my sony xr520 has night vision so I checked, I can't see that it's transmitting any light but on the front of the camera you can see a faint red dot.

Thanks Noa, that's helpful to know.

On the Canon C300 forum there's a posting

C300 Shooting in a Darkroom ... a very Darkroom !

May be useful.

Useful indeed. Impressive results. Not a cheap camera to rent, but definitely looks like an option.

On the Canon C300 forum there's a posting

C300 Shooting in a Darkroom ... a very Darkroom !

May be useful.
How does the c300 film under these circumstances, with very high gain? If that would be the case a Sony FS100 would be a cheaper option to rent as it can record at very (maybe equally?) high gain values as well.

Well the video in Mark Moreve's post says iso 20,000 and lens at f2.8, so with a faster lens it could be even more sensitive. There surely a few cameras that would be cheaper to rent than the C300 but still improve on my 60D's low light sensitivity. FS100, maybe the D800, 5DIII, probably even the 5DII should be an improvement?
In any case, I'll probably do the first test with my 60D and a fast lens. With ML I can go as high as iso 12800. We'll test the results and then we'll have a think about if and what camera to rent.

I'll also try to see if Mark has any advice

On a 60d 12800 iso will look awefull, at 3200 iso you are already looking at using neatvideo. Didn"t think about the 5DIII, think you can safely use 12800 iso on that one and should be very cheap to rent.

Hey Guys, a quick update...
Did some tests over the weekend.
Got a Nikon D800 for the tests, and also tried my own 60D.

Some observations :
- We managed to secure the darkroom entirely for ourselves. Don't think it would be really possible to get any video done if there were other people sharing the darkroom.
- Light from camera LCD was actually a non-issue, we didn't block it as it did not seem to affect the developing process in any noticeable way.
- "Darkroom" for B&W is well lit. Not a big of an issue to get decent footage as I had anticipated.
- With the 60D and the 50 1.8 lens, I could actually get a usable image in ISO 800, although it was a bit too underexposed, and honestly noise was not much better than at ISO 1600, which produced a better exposure.
- With the D800, we only had a f2.8 lens, and so we had to use ISO 1600 as well. We aim to get the D800 again for the final session with a faster lens.
- D800 seems to be producing as much noise as the 60D, however the noise is more 'film-like', less offensive. (probably down to Canon's bad downscaling/compression). We prefer the D800 image, but even so, the 60D footage is usable.
- On the 60D, I tried a few shots with increased bitrate (through ML hack) in the hope that it may alleviate the compression issues. I'll have to further scrutinize the footage, but at first glance it does not seem to me to produce any noticeable improvement.

Next stage is to see how much improvement could be done to the footage in post.
Thanks to all of your help so far, will update again...

Seems to be working OK for you so maybe useless info, but in the "old" days film was orthochromatic and only green and blue sensitive so FILM developing was done with red lights. Then the mid 50's or thereabouts Panchromatic film came along and we moved from red safelights to no safelights.

Print material is vastly less sensitive than film so the yellow safelights (ie non blue) work fine. I think in a film darkroom the lights from the camera would make a mess and I always take off my watch when loading film into holders.

Some people do use infrared night vision glasses when working in a film darkroom but most of us just do everything by feel. Particularly those of us whe remember orthochromatic film (which is still available by the way)

Just to add my 2p to the equation...........

When I was living in London shooting with a Canon XL 1s, I had some (how) printed blurb from one of the big rental companies about image intensifiers for use on same.

As what you are shooting is basically going to be monochrome, why not find a camera/ image intensifier rig you can rent?

In case I lost anybody, I'm talking about those "see in the dark" night vision devices so beloved of the military and rescue services.

They can be had to rent in single lens camera formats at at least one of the big pro rental companies in the South East UK, or at least, they could.

The newer ones make pitch black look like midday in the Sahara.

Just a thought.


CS

You're going to need a safe-light that you can move around the room to give the bare illumination that you need. Alongside that, I'd suggest an f/1.4 lens (or faster) and one of these newfangled cameras that does crazy-high ISO (F3, C300, FS100).

if you are filming the print as it develops in a tray, you could focus and lock the shot on a tripod and then do a time-lapse with intervalometer.

Spent couple of decades in a darkroom.

If they have mercury vapor lights with an OC filter things can get fairly bright. Shouldn't be a problem with today's cameras which are quite sensitive.

You can probably add additional illumination just to see the image come up on paper. A critical eye might detect "fogging" on a print with a brighter light, but if it's just to see something appear on the print in the developer tray, it shouldn't be a problem.

Guys, once again, thanks.

We did the shoot with the Nikon D800. Darkroom for B&W developing was relatively bright, so no need for any special measures as I had worried about before hand.

I will post some clips as soon as I can.

Why were you trying to shoot this under actual conditions?

Even for a demonstration you can light it and grade it so that it would look the same as it would to the human eye under the actual conditions. If you want to show an image develop on the paper you can do that with a bit of CG in aftereffects.

It has got to be easier to do it that way versus trying to find a camera and a setup that will work under the actual darkroom conditions.

I was helping out an artist who wanted to capture live the actual process of an image developing on paper.
Since the darkroom conditions were in fact not that harsh, this turned out to be relatively easy with the D800. Even my 60D with a fast lens produced acceptable results, though not as fine as the D800.