INTRO + DARKROOM NOTES / SICILY

What to expect from my photography Substack.

Hello and welcome to Notes from the Darkroom, a Substack by Isabelle Hardy, a photographer based between Paris and London. That’s me! I’m so happy you’re here.

The idea for this Substack came to me a few months ago when I found myself craving a space to display and share my darkroom process and progress. Whenever I post behind the scenes at the darkroom on my Instagram, I always get really lovely reactions so I wanted to carve out a more dedicated space for this to live, rather than just my Instagram stories that expire after 24 hours. I am far from being an expert in hand-printing but I hope you’ll enjoy following my journey - I know everyone else is just as nosy as I am about getting a glimpse into other people’s process!

Film photography is one of my great loves and having learnt black and white darkroom printing at school, last year I decided to finally learn to hand-print in colour. Fast forward eighteen months and the results of my darkroom sessions have just ended up in boxes in a cupboard (well, and on my Instagram feed, of course). Stacks of test strips (yes, I’ve kept them all), Sharpie scribbles, and beautiful final prints all hidden away and I thought this was such a shame. So, just like I did during photography A-level, I have started to curate my hand-printing journey into a sketchbook and I’m going to share it with you in this Substack.

I hope to expand this Substack into more than just the inner workings of my darkroom journey. I want to record shoot case studies and interviews, share my experience shooting at fashion week, provide advice in the chat feature, give you journalling prompts, but for now (and for the first few installments of Notes from the Darkroom) we’re going back in time to shoots I have printed over the past year or so. Today is all about what I produced in my first colour hand-printing workshop back in April 2023.

April 2023 – Rapid Eye, London

Having just returned from a trip to Sicily, I took my fresh negatives along to a colour printing workshop at Rapid Eye in Shoreditch, London. My go-to Contax G2 was out of action at the time of this trip so I shot these images on my boyfriend’s Canon AE1, which I hadn’t used before. I love the results.

First, I learnt how to print a contact sheet, which lets you see the full roll and easily choose which images to print (that is, if you haven’t had the negatives scanned). It also gives you a starting point in terms of exposure and colour filtration. I loved the warm and glowy feel of the images on the contact sheet so I decided to aim for this look when printing my favourite shots.

I managed to print 5 images (plus the contact sheet) in the 4 hour workshop, which I think is pretty good going for my first time colour printing. I think it helped that the negatives were exposed properly and the initial test strips had nice colour grade that just needed tweaking slightly for each image.

And here are the final results…

I still love these images so much now - the colours just exude Mediterranean living and the landscapes and cultural scenes are some of my favourite I’ve ever captured. I think this would make a beautiful print series (yet another idea that has been in my head for months but that’s another story!).

I hope you have enjoyed this post - let me know in your thoughts or any questions in the comments below. This hand-printing workshop has been transformative for me as an artist and I have been printing my work in the darkroom ever since - I’m excited to continue sharing this journey with you.