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K.Spacey - K-PAX
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Avoiding print staining and working healthy

Although some analogue photographers proud themselves on having stained fingers all the time as proof of their hard manual labour in the darkroom, I don't. Besides the possible negative health effects of coming into direct contact with photo chemicals (the hydroquinone in developers is suspected of being carcinogenic), there are good other reasons to not have your fingers and hands get dirty. Any residues of chemicals are likely to cause visible staining of your prints as well, something wholly undesirable in fine art printing (unless of course you strive for a dirty & greasy look in your artistic prints...). One of the most common visible kinds of staining are a kind of "purplish" type stains. As I understood from fellow photographers, these may be caused by traces of developer on hands, transferred to the photo paper during handling. It turns up as these stains after the paper has passed through all baths. Besides the visible staining, the staining may also affect archivability of your prints.

So what can you do to avoid staining and work healthy?

- Wash your hands thoroughly after getting into contact with photo chemicals. If, for example, a print tong accidentally ends up in a bath, I not only rinse the tong thoroughly in running water, but also wash my hands with some soap. This avoids residues building up on hands.

- Use gloves when handling bottles with chemicals and preparing for printing. When emptying bottles in trays, I wear a pair of surgical gloves to keep my hands clean. Although a pair of general household glove will do to, surgical gloves have the advantage of stretching to fit your hand, giving a better tactile feeling and thus less chance of spilling any stuff. They can be bought in large packs from your local pharmacist. An additional benefit of surgical gloves is that they are cheap and can therefore be easily disposed of after usage and contamination.

- Designate each tray and print tong for a specific function and mark them accordingly. By reserving each tray and tong for a specific chemical bath, you can avoid cross contamination and staining caused by residues of another chemical bath still present from a previous printing session. Mark all the equipment clearly using permanent markers.

- Work cleanly in general. Have access chemicals run of prints before dumping them in the next bath etc.

- Another aspect of working healthy is to have adequate ventilation in your darkroom. Thanks to modern well buffered solutions and environmental regulations, photo chemicals nowadays only give off very slight amounts of hazardous or poignant gasses. Still, the need for adequate ventilation in a darkroom remains, not just in terms of health issues, but also to protect your equipment. The gasses are chemically reactive, and may effect your equipment in the long run. I installed a bath room ventilator to overcome this. Bath room ventilators are cheap and can be easily bought at any good do-it-yourself shop. The only possible problematic requirement is of course the presence of a suitable ventilation shaft.

- In terms of ventilation, darkrooms have another issue too. Although a ventilator can suck out poignant gasses, it requires a free inflow of air in the darkroom. However, in terms of light safety, you will be easily tempted to seal of your darkrooms door and possibly windows altogether, blocking a free inflow of fresh air. I solved this by sawing a hole in the darkrooms door and covering it up with the same things that are used to cover up wall ventilating shafts at the outsides of houses. Painted black, this is not enough for darkroom safety, so I have added a light block using two pieces of black carton in-between, while still allowing an uninterrupted flow of fresh air into the darkroom. Of course, the expensive solution to all this, is to install a full air-conditioning installation, devices that are not very common in the Netherlands for average household usage, but may be easily had in some other countries.

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