Darkroom Garage

Whatever your hobby or interest is there is a pretty good chance that you will need room to enjoy it and let it expand. When I say room, I really mean a room. What better room for your hobbies to flourish than your garage? It can often handle housing your cars as well as a number of other things while giving you room to fool around with whatever else seems to give you a bit of happiness. Most hobbies need a bit of space to be enjoyed plus there is all of the gear or the tools that you need for the hobby and you end up needing to put aside a fair bit of space. The ability to move something as large as a car in and out of the space means that it is incredibly easy to transform your garage space into an alternative space. This, among other reasons, makes your garage a perfect spot do experiment with a hobby that is surprisingly still popular that we are going to delve into in this article. That hobby is film photography. Your garage can make a great darkroom with an astonishingly small amount of money and work put into it. Film and film cameras are in many ways cheaper than ever and so we are just going to go through a few of the reasons why your garage makes the perfect dark room with almost no investment and changes needed. If you have a garage darkroom or a similarly odd use for your garage please feel free to share with us. One reason that the garage darkroom makes so much sense is because your garage is most likely already a dark room. Garage doors typically don’t have many windows and if they do they can be easily covered. Most garages also don’t have full windows and so there is very little light coming into the room even if you are using the area to store your car. This means that you can easily block out this light coming from any windows and your garage door with some black out curtains and tape. These things will cost you easily less than a hundred dollars even if you have lots of windows and you’ll have the perfect place to develop all of your own film, potentially saving you loads in the process. Your garage is most likely one of the darkest rooms in your home and during the time that you aren’t using it as a dark room you can open your garage door and remove the curtains giving you a still fully functional room with no fuss. Another reason that your garage is a perfect darkroom for you home is because of the chemicals used in developing film. As nice as it is to develop your own film there is really something to be said for the chemicals used in the process. They are smelly and usually not the best things to be tracking through your home and what not. The chemicals can be dangerous if something like a leak or spill were to happen which is exactly where the benefits of a garage come in once again. Your garage has some great ways to contain and mitigate the problems associated with these kinds of things. Most garages have cement or concrete floors which won’t get damaged or let the chemicals soak in. This means you can take your time if you spill, clear out any light sensitive materials and get to cleaning up. You can then open up the garage door airing out any smells extremely quickly and bringing in light to help you clean up whatever mess has been made. The garage door also helps to just air out the garage for things like normal usage which can still mean bad smells getting to linger after a number of developments. Lastly there is the benefit of having a darkroom that doesn’t cost you a lot. You can do as many rolls of film as you want whenever you want and you are only paying a small amount for the chemicals you use. That and the small amount of electricity you might use for the film friendly lamp and you are going to quickly be seeing your small investment work itself off. Being able to develop film whenever you want for how ever long you want is a great luxury that not that many people think they can have. If you are still using film however it is incredibly easy to get started with the process and rather easy to learn. In no time at all you will have saved the money that you spent on things like black out curtains and lamps to turn your garage into a part time dark room and will be able to spend that on more important things. Whether those things are related to your film photography hobby or not is your decision. Having your own dark room in your garage is not only a cost saving measure for those that do a fair amount of film photography, but it is a whole other facet of the film photography hobby. Thankfully setting up a garage for your dilm development is actually incredibly easy and pretty cheap. Most garages and garage doors are already doing most of the work that would need to be done to turn other rooms into dark rooms so you don’t have much to do. If you have some room in your garage that could be used for a hobby and happen to be an avid photographer then pick up some equipment and get started. Your garage is easy to clean if things go wrong and easy to transform if you need to use the space for anything else. When you’re done just open up your garage door and air out the space and you will be better off than most dark rooms in traditional rooms and not in garages.