Darkroom Dave in Amateur Photographer Magazine

 It was a pleasant surprise to get an email from photo journalist Damien Demolder asking if I would like him to do a 6 page article on me for Amateur Photographer magazine in the UK. I had previously met Damien for chats a couple of times at the Focus on Imaging exhibition at the NEC when I was exhibiting my prints, books and courses on the Ilford Photo stand. That show finished in 2013 so it was a long time between chats!

Covid restricted the options for the interview by Damien so we did it through Zoom, in fact it was more of a chat than an interview and lasted for the best part of 2 hours. I think we might have reminisced rather too much!

I don't have a copy of the magazine but Damien sent me a link to the digital issue so that I could extract the article to share it here as 3 double page spreads. I'm amazed how much of our chat Damien has managed to include in the 6 pages.

The article was published in the 29th March 2022 issue of Amateur Photographer.

I hope you enjoy reading it here.

New Printing Videos on Darkroom Dave

There are 3 new videos covering the darkroom printing process on Darkroom Dave as well as YouTube.

Making your first black and white print Tutorial
This tutorial includes how to make a test strip and how to make a print using a single exposure. 2 of the videos are included here.

Split Grade Printing the Ilford Way
Split grade printing should be the normal way to make prints on variable contrast papers like Ilford Multigrade. One of the new videos describes the technique.

These 3 videos summarise what I cover on my darkroom printing workshops. Here are the videos:

Making a Test Strip

Making a Print

Split Grade Printing

Darkroom Dave Has Arrived!

For some time I have been thinking about separating my main website www.davebutcher.co.uk from the technical information in order to improve navigation.

I have been actively working on this, with Andy Oakey my web and marketing man from Sheffield, for a few months and have now completed the main part of the project. My new website for all things technical to do with black and white film photography and darkroom processing and printing is now Live!

The site is called www.darkroomdave.com

I have had to learn a few new skills to bring this to fruition, most notably how to make and edit videos. Most of these are on the Tutorials page which has a mix of text articles and videos.

The technical information from my main website www.davebutcher.co.uk has been copied or moved and updated. This includes some of the FAQ's section and there is a new blog specially for photography and darkroom related items. The last blog post was describing the way I do the videos as I had no idea how to do this just 3 weeks ago!

www.darkroomdave.com seems to work on mobile phones and tablets but as is usual with new sites I'm sure there will be teething problems. Please let me know if you spot anything using my email mono@davebutcher.co.uk. The screenshots here are all from my Google Nexus 10 tablet.

There is also a gallery for darkroom and photography related photos as well as the last 10 photos loaded onto the www.davebutcher.co.uk site. Events are listed more prominently too.

There is a button top right to link directly to my new YouTube video channel and another for my Google+ business page which uses +DavebutcherCoUk as the name.

I hope you find it useful. Dave