Using an iPhone to make a print in the darkroom

- I'm holding here a photographic print of an image shot with an iPhone. If you've watched my iPhone shooting course, you know that I take the iPhone camera very seriously, it's a great photographic tool. What you probably can't tell from sitting there on the other side of the lens is that this is an actual photographic print. This was made in a darkroom, and this was done by actually putting the iPhone in an enlarger and using it to expose a piece of photographic paper, which was then developed normally. My friend, Roberto, figured all this out and got it all working, and has put together a really cool video showing how you can do this.

So if you've got a black and white darkroom at home and an iPhone, you really might wanna play with this. Take a look. - Digital photography has its advantages. For example, you can rely on your camera, on your software to make some critical decisions. However, one of the best things of analog photography is that you are the one in charge of everything. One creative way to combine the best of both worlds is to connect your enlarger to a smartphone. The process is very simple.

All you need to have is a black and white picture. This is a black and white setup for the darkroom. The picture needs to be inverted. There's a lot of smartphone apps that can do that. Once you have that, you just need to find a way to place it into your enlarger. Now, I have a Beseler here, but they function pretty much all the same. The only tricky thing is, as you can see, this is a 35 millimeter negative carrier. However, the iPhone is much thicker. So you could technically place it in here and light is gonna be projected through the lens anyway.

However, there's going to be a lot of leakage from here, so what I did is I created this housing out of some packaging material. I just cut a hole in it the size of an iPhone and as you can see, you can fit it right into it, then into the enlarger this way. There's not gonna be any leakage. Speaking of lighting, we're not going to rely on the enlarger lights, but we're gonna strictly rely on the iPhone display. And in my experience I notice that you should set up your luminosity display to 50 percent, roughly.

That's a good place to start. And after that, you're just gonna go through the normal darkroom process. So I'm gonna turn the light off and we'll get started. So here we are. As you can see, the iPhone is mounted inside of the enlarger and one of the challenges that you're gonna have is that the image will look too big. And this is simply because the size of your display is much bigger than the size of a regular 35 millimeter piece of film. So what you need to do is to get your enlarger head closer to the base.

Another way you could do this is by choosing a different lens, a longer lens. In my case, I only have a 50 millimeter, so we're gonna use that. And we're gonna crank down the head. As you can see, the size is getting smaller and the focus is getting more accurate. So right here I have an easel, it's called a fast easel, that will give me the ability to figure out the framing of my print and I can just slip the paper right into it. Before I do that though, I need to make sure that focus is really accurate.

So I have a focusing sight here. I will place it right in here, and move the focusing knob on the side and I will make sure that I can see all those little pixels nice and clear. There we go, very sharp. Okay, now, one important thing is you cannot control the light of your enlarger through a timer since your iPhone is inside and there's no way you can control it.

The best way to do that I found is to simply block the light from the lens. You can simply use a lens caps so that light won't come out of the lens. After you're done with that you're ready to get your paper out. Based on the kind of paper you're using, you should be able to figure out which side is the part that has the emulsion. So I'm gonna place it right into the easel. And there you go. The next step is I'm going to cover the paper like this.

And at this point, I've already done a test with this, I know that a 30 second exposure is gonna be fine for this. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna remove the cap for the lens so light is coming through the lens. Now I set up a timer anyway for 30 seconds, so I'll have an idea when that's done. I'm gonna turn that on, and remove the board I placed to block the light, basically.

There you go, so 30 seconds. We're gonna cover again our picture. We're gonna put our cap on for the lens, so we're not gonna have any light coming through the enlarger. Now we are ready to place our photo inside the developer. Here you go. As you can see, the picture is coming out. Make sure you agitate the trays every 10 seconds or so. Here you go.

I'll take my photo. and move it to the stop bath. Like I mentioned earlier, make sure you always agitate every 10 seconds or so. So I'm ready to move to the next tray, the fixer. Here you go. In this case another minute should be fine. Alright, once we're done with this, the print is ready to be washed.

We're gonna turn the light on and take a look at what we have. And there you have it, so here is our final result. As you can see, yes there is some vignetting, some pixelation going on. And you will encounter some limitations like this, depending on your display resolution or your enlarger, but I think it's a great way to combine digital and analog. And again, it could be a great way to embrace those limitations as well. So go have fun with it.

- The process is very straightforward and makes a lot of sense when you watch him do it. I have not done it myself, I'm sure there's some trial and error and some stuff to get figured out. One thing I wanna say since you can't see this photo in person, I can see pixels in it. If I get real close, I can see what appears to be a very fine grid over the image. But from any reasonable distance, it looks like a perfectly continuous tone image. So I think this is a really interesting way to get output from the phone, and something that is well worth experimenting with if you are interested in doing real darkroom work.