Im in the planning stages of a Darkroom, Whats the proper distance or placement of your safelight, aslo can you recomend a good but affordable light? The What color should my walls be and celling. Any suggestions that you could make before I put my darkroom together would be greatly appriciated. Thanks

-- Mark (Mark4583@aol.com), January 14, 2001

Answers

My darkroom walls are painted white and black around the enlarger. As for safe distance, most people say around 4 feet. I personally always bounce the safelight off of the wall or ceiling, I find a safelight pointed into the room has the effect of blinding me anytime I look towards it. I love the Zone VI safelight. If you factor in the cost of replacement filters it is actually a very reasonably priced unit. I might caution you about trying to have your safelight too close to your work area, darkrooms are suppose to be dark and variable contrast papers are very sensitive to safelights.

-- Jeff White (jeff@jeffsphotos.com), January 14, 2001.

Agree with everything Jeff said. Also, I like to have more than one safelight, even if the secondary ones are just the old Kodak "bullet" type. These can be used to light up otherwise dark corners, the wash area, walkways, or whatever. Nice even low level lighting is usually better than a bright spot surrounded by blackness!

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), January 14, 2001.

Another vote here for the old Kodak beehive. My working area is an 'L' shape about 8 foot by 6. The wet area and sink are along the short side, and the enlargers share with the timers, analyser and some other junk on the longer benchtop. The walls and ceiling were once white, but now more off-white. I haven't painted the walls black around the enlargers, since it looks ugly when the room serves it's second purpose as digital darkroom. Instead, I have a red folding 'plastiboard' 3 sided box that fits around the baseboard of whichever enlarger I'm using.
A single beehive lamp with an OC filter, pointed at the ceiling, gives me all the light I need. It's positioned within easy reach of the developer tray, and if needed, it can be swung round to light the tray directly.
Another advantage of the beehive is that the filters are interchangeable. I have a selection of filters that came with the safelight, and occassionally swap the OC for special purpose filters.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), January 15, 2001.

Oh yes! One other thing.
I have the safelight wired into the enlarger timer, so that it gets turned off when the enlarger lamp is on. This makes it much easier to see what you're doing during focusing, positioning, dodging and burning.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), January 15, 2001.

I too like to bounce the light off of white walls/ceilings. I alos like the Kodak Two Way safelight (triangular with light coming out of two sides) for over the darkroom sink.

I use OC filters in mine.

WRT color of the room, white. When you turn out the lights, everything is black anyway. So you want to make use of whaterver light there is when you have the lights on.

-- Terry Carraway (TCarraway@compuserve.com), January 15, 2001.

Kodak has some good info about safelights, and how to test them:

http://www.kodak.com/cluster/global/en/consumer/products/techInfo/k4/k 4Facts.shtml

My darkroom walls and ceiling are flat white, except near the enlarger where they are flat black. I have two safelights that I built with LEDs, which are mounted inside diffused ceiling fixtures; one over the dry bench and one over the wet. They are switched separately, with the switches located next to the enlarger.

When your darkroom is finished, be sure to test the safelights, according Kodak's instructions, with each paper type that you use. Different brands/types of paper can have vastly different sensitivity to safelight.

-- Chris Ellinger (ellinger@umich.edu), January 15, 2001.

I'm retired now, but there was a flourescent safelight available in 24" and 48" tubes. Plus, I was able to duplicate the same effect using filter material from Helix in Chicago, IL- and wraping standard tubes. Worked great, aimed at ceiling. Plus, I had Kodak beehives on footswitches at the developer and fixer trays, for momentary extra light. Sometimes I would used undiluted developer directly on print surface to bring up certain areas- used your finger in a swirl motion which creates heat also... (like perhaps unwanted highlight areas)

-- Ed Langley (ed-lang@home.com), January 27, 2001.