Hello from the Dorkroom!
Hello everyone!
While in the process of creating my website Dorkroom.art, I thought it may be a good idea to start documenting my trials and tribulations with creating the website, as well as my own experiences in the photo darkroom that inspired me to create the site and some of my other tools.
A newsletter and/or blog for a calculator website, huh? Who thought that would be a good idea? Me! I thought it was a good idea! This won't be entirely about the website, but it will revolve around the ideas and subject matter of the site, as well as my own thoughts on things. And so, here's a little introduction to me, if you don't already know me:
My name is Aaron, and I'm a 28 year-old photographer in San Francisco, California. I work at the Harvey Milk Photo Center (HMPC), which is the largest* public black and white darkroom in the United States. It's run by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, and it's a really cool, unique space; I don't know if there are any other municipalities that still run photography centers, let alone film photography focused ones.
*If you know of any larger darkrooms in the US (ours is 1,700+ square feet and contains about 35+ functional enlarging stations), please let me know, so I can finally stop saying that!
My primary role at the Photo Center is operating the darkroom and helping our members create their work. It's very fun and challenging environment to work in a large darkroom that caters to literally anyone who wants to come in and do stuff with film photography. I've absorbed an unreasonable about of knowledge about film photography, darkroom printing, and digital processes including (unfortunately) digital printing, just by way of being at the Photo Center almost every day it's been open since September 2021.
Of all the tasks and work I do at the Photo Center, the things that I'm most passionate about are those that involve our members, and the problems and interesting situations we frequently encounter together. In particular, I'm proud of our annual Member, Staff, and Volunteer Show, which I've been the primary organizer of for the last 3 years alongside my coworkers. This year's show was beautiful, and had the work of over 90 people in it, totaling over 190 individual photographs on our walls. The creation of that show always involves a lot of people doing lots of new stuff for their first time, and a big part of my role during that show other than actually making it happen administratively is helping people through these new experiences to make work that they're proud of.
Through my learnings and experiences with members at the Photo Center, I started to feel a need to actually make something useful for other people inside and outside of my workplace, and that's how Dorkroom.art was born. There was a lot of post-it note math I was calculating for people to help them out in the darkroom, and as someone who can't stop seeing problems that need solving, I started to see a reason for creating something that would be helpful to analog photographers and printers to reduce friction on repetitive tasks. Printing in the darkroom already takes long enough, why waste more time doing hand and napkin math?
The original plan, if one could call it a plan, was to create an open source simple website of calculators written in pure Javascript, CSS, and HTML as a way to encourage myself to learn more about web technology, but my ambitions soon snowballed and I found myself writing a full stack web app in React that covers maybe too many bases.
Side note: I really love the name Dorkroom, but regrettably it's not the most original thought. While I did "come up with it" independently as a way of referring to my work's darkroom being a place where dorks (such as myself) did dorky things, the term "dorkroom" has been around since at least the founding of this Something Awful subforum. It almost kind of stings, as when I was younger I always wanted to be on Something Awful but never had the money to sign up for an account!
In posts I have planned for the future, I'll go into the details behind the creation, evolution, and the future of Dorkroom, stories from the Photo Center, and my own personal fun that I've had both in the darkroom and outside taking pictures to make my own work. I see Dorkroom as a multifaceted outlet for myself, as it's a wonderful blend of my main interests: photography, technology, and learning what makes artists so weird (in a good way, usually).
Be sure to check out Dorkroom.art, as I'm always updating it to add new features, tools, and other cool stuff. I'm currently working on adding as many official manufacturer specified development times as I can to the development recipes page, as well as official documentations for the tools. The docs will eventually morph into a big resource for guides on film development, darkroom printing, and more.
Before I go, here's a song I've loved for a while, but have been enjoying a lot lately:
With all that said and shared, I hope you'll join me and subscribe to this here newsletter for more hopefully interesting insights from me.
Have a great winter and holiday season!
-Aaron