Well, since it was my dad mentioning my old darkroom that spurred me into finally creating a blog I suppose it would be a decent place to start from. I built my darkroom in … I believe it was the summer of 1988.
Correction. It must have been 1990 as it appears that was the year that Danny Sullivan won the Cleveland Grand Prix. The film I shot there (while my dad was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy) was the first I developed after getting my enlarger. One of the first shots I printed was of Danny Sullivan just before the race when I happened to get a few frames of him. I’ll have to try and dig those up and scan them sometime. The one shot I liked best from that weekend has been on my website for about as long as I’ve had a website and was of Arie Luyendyke, who got 5th in the CART race but went on to take 1st at the Indy 500 that year.
My dad helped a lot more than he lets on in helping me with the darkroom. He may not have been able to physically help with erecting the walls, sweating the plumbing fittings, wiring the room or even the drywall at the time I built it. But he had helped me plan the project and more importantly had involved me in enough projects before that I already had first hand experience with most of the skills I needed. The one part of the job the could have helped with but didn’t was the original cleanup. That was the price I had to pay for building in his basement – it was up to me to make room and keep the darkroom area cleaner that it was before I started.
These first shots were after I had already cleaned out most of the corner to try and help convince my dad that I was serious.
Once I had the OK and had bought the first load of lumber I cleaned the corner out completely and started to build:
Going to look into better ways of linking my photos (better as in easier for me when posting!) then come back and post the inside shots along with some of it a little later after being in steady use for awhile.
