Field Notes · SEPT 2026
The Latent Image
How the Darkroom Shaped the Way I Work
Photography was the first creative medium I invested in, specifically black-and-white film and the darkroom. I began my freshman year of high school, and by senior year, half my classes were photography and darkroom work. It's where my ideas about creativity took shape: the act of looking, what a frame includes or leaves out, and a structure simple enough to actually see. Only a few variables mattered, and everything happened within them. You quickly learn what changes when you move three feet or wait for the light to shift.
Shooting means deciding what’s in the frame and what’s left out. Some choices come before you look through the viewfinder. The film you load opens some possibilities and closes others: its speed, grain, and contrast. Flattening a three-dimensional moment to two is one of the first decisions. It’s perception under real constraints: light, distance, a shutter that opens once. When the shutter closes, the image exists as a latent one, a change in the film that stays invisible until developed.
Then comes developing, where earlier skills no longer help. The tank is sealed, or the room is dark, and every decision is timed and manual. This part is chemistry: a developer at a set strength and temperature, agitated on a schedule, timed to the second, then stopped, then fixed. The balance matters. Too little agitation can make the process uneven; too much can push the contrast too far. Once the tank is closed, you can’t adjust anything, so you must know the process before you start. Here, the image stops being latent, and the earlier choices become visible—usually to you alone, before anyone else sees the negative.
The two stages require different skills, yet they’re linked because each is planned with the other in mind. In low light, you can rate a roll faster than box speed and push it later, developing longer to build density. In a high-contrast scene, you can rate it slower and pull with less development so highlights stay printable. The old darkroom rule: expose for shadows, develop for highlights—the camera sets shadow detail, development controls the highlights. The developer is another variable. Some favor fine grain, some sharpness, and some, used dilute over time, keep bright areas in check. Mine was Rodinal, patented in 1891, the oldest developer still in production. It gives sharp edges and distinct grain, and its character shifts with dilution. I usually rated film one or two stops faster than box speed and extended development to match. That gave higher contrast, deeper blacks, brighter whites, and more grain, in exchange for less shadow detail. Most of this is decided at the camera, by someone who already knows what the next room can do.
Printing follows the same arc, on a smaller scale. Before committing to a full sheet, you run a test strip—seconds of exposure at a time—to find the right range. Expose the paper, and it goes latent again: a second invisible image, resolved by its own pass through developer, stop, and fixer. Printing inherits the negative and its record, then adds its own choices: overall exposure, how long you hold light back from one part of the image or give more to another, and which paper grade and surface you use. Printing works within the negative’s range, and a good printer learns where its edges are.
The same shape holds even after chemistry disappears. Digital tools can do everything printing did, and more, still working by calibrating and extending what was captured. When post-production needs heavy correction, it often points to something upstream—like the brief, the shot list, or the plan. Fixing it there usually takes more time and budget than if done at the start. The exception is work where manipulation was planned: a composite, or a look built rather than found. That work has its own brief, decisions, and sequence.
Take photography away, and the rhythm holds. Creative work moves through stages that don’t share a skill set, and an early choice shapes what every later stage works with. That’s the structure I bring to creative operations: treating each stage as its own discipline, with its own people and skills, while planning each one with the next in mind.
I see the same sequence in project work. The earliest stage often comes before the creative team is involved. Business development and sales gather the information that defines a project: the client’s goals, budget, timeline, and what’s been promised. That sets the parameters the working group starts from, as film loaded before the first frame. When something is missing or translated imprecisely, the gap travels downstream and shows up later in quotes, feedback, and vendor conversations. The brief comes next. Words like “bold” or “clean” can get nodded through while everyone pictures something different. Agreement and enthusiasm look the same from the outside, so the brief is the place to define those words with references, before anything gets made. The review and schedule follow the same pattern. A note about color or copy sometimes traces back to a decision never made at the start, and the best time to estimate what the work will need is before the schedule is locked, while there’s still room to shape it.
That’s where this way of seeing started: watching a print come up in the tray and resolve into something I could no longer change. The sequence was the same for everyone in that darkroom, with the same light, film, and chemistry. What changed was how each step was carried out.
Knowing the sequence well made it possible to change it on purpose. My first experiment was reticulation: moving film between very hot and cold baths so the emulsion cracked into a fine, irregular pattern. That led to a body of work in which I removed the silver from each negative in stages, making a print each time. One negative produced several unique images, each recording a version that no longer existed. Photographers usually treat the negative as the thing to protect, the source for prints. In this work, the negative became another stage, open to change, and each print was a one-of-a-kind record of where it stood at that moment.
I still work that way. I learn the structure well enough to know which variables matter and how far each can move, then put my attention there. Sometimes that means working precisely within it; sometimes it means changing one part on purpose, knowing what the change will do.