Negative Thinking is a community darkroom in Bristol, run by Tim and Emily, where you can hire a darkroom for £5 per hour including all chemistry, or take a workshop in pretty much any alternative process you can think of for £50. Those prices are not a marketing tactic. They are the mission.
Tim has been working in darkrooms for 22 years. He has the kind of practical knowledge that is increasingly rare. He could charge what other people charge for one-to-one tuition. He chooses not to, on principle: photography is shared cultural heritage, and the more people who get access to it, the better.
I went to see Tim for a darkroom refresher. I had done some printing as a teenager but it had been thirty years and I was rusty. I left with more than a technique lesson. I left with a meaningful shift in how I think about my own photography.
This article is partly about what I learned in the darkroom, partly about the philosophy behind Negative Thinking, and partly about why I am now committing to using my own home darkroom more seriously. If you have a community darkroom anywhere near you, this is a piece about why you should go and use it.
What Negative Thinking is
A small, well-equipped community darkroom in Bristol with:
- Multiple enlargers for 35mm through medium format (and possibly larger, I did not check every station)
- Full black and white chemistry in trays, ready to go
- Colour chemistry if you want to print colour (you bring your own paper)
- Alternative process facilities including a silver bath for wet plate collodion
- Workshop space for teaching sessions
Tim and Emily run it together. The model is simple: anyone can walk in, pay £5 per hour, and use the darkroom. You bring your own paper (because paper choice is personal). The chemistry is provided. If you want to do an alternative process you have not done before, you book a workshop first as your introduction, and after that you can come back and do it yourself any time.
This includes wet plate collodion. Yes, really. £5 per hour to use a silver bath that someone else has prepared and maintains. The genuine value proposition here is significant.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Negative Thinking darkroom, showing the enlargers and the working space]
The lesson: things I had forgotten or never knew
Tim ran me through printing a black and white frame from my Bronica ETRS (a portrait of my kids). I knew enough to know I was rusty. I did not know quite how much I had forgotten. A few things genuinely useful.
Choose the right enlarger lens for your format. This is something I had been getting wrong. The standard pairings:
- 35mm: 50mm enlarger lens
- 645: 70-75mm
- 6x6: 80mm
- 6x9: 105mm
- 4x5: 150mm
- 8x10: 300mm
The principle is that the enlarger lens focal length should roughly match your negative format. I had been using whatever was in the enlarger. Lesson learned.
You do not actually need a lens at all. Tim mentioned, almost in passing, that you can print with a pinhole instead of an enlarger lens. You cannot focus it (which makes framing hard) but the principle works. This is the kind of casual remark that opens up a creative possibility I had not considered.
Start contrast at grade 2.5, not 0. I had been starting test strips at grade 0 (lowest contrast) on the basis that you can always add contrast later. Wrong instinct. Tim explained: if you start at zero, you can only go up. If you start at five, you can only go down. Start in the middle (grade 2.5) so you can move either direction based on what the test strip shows. Obvious in retrospect.
Use a grain magnifier with a sheet of your actual paper. I knew about grain magnifiers but had not thought about the paper thickness affecting focus. Keep a sheet of the paper you are using in the box, slip it under the magnifier when focusing, and you guarantee the focus is correct for that specific paper. Tiny detail, real improvement.
Fixing times depend on paper type. Two minutes is enough to expose the print to room light safely. But full fixing requires 4 minutes for resin-coated paper and 6 minutes for fibre paper. The difference is that resin-coated paper has the emulsion sitting on top of a plastic-coated base, while fibre paper has the emulsion absorbed into the actual paper fibres, which takes longer to fix completely.
Dodge and burn by watching the easel, not the paper. When burning in additional exposure to make part of the print darker, you watch the projected image on the easel above, not the paper below. Obvious once you think about it, but I had not been doing this properly.
![PLACEHOLDER: the test strip from the printing lesson, showing the different exposure increments Tim used]
The mindset shift
This is where the session became more than a technique lesson.
I had been carrying around a sense that I was supposed to know what I was doing in the darkroom. That an experienced printer would just nail the exposure on the first try. That experimentation was somehow wasteful, that I was doing it wrong by feeling my way around.
Watching Tim work disabused me of all of this.
Tim, with 22 years of darkroom experience behind him, was still essentially feeling his way. He was getting closer to the right exposure faster than I would, yes, but he was still making test strips, looking at the results, adjusting, trying again. Photographs are not made by mechanical precision in the darkroom. They are made by trying things, looking at them, and trying something different.
He said something that has stuck with me: “Photography is a very accessible art form because it does not rely on tacit skill that takes years of practice. You can get into the darkroom, try things, and achieve wonderful results within a few hours of learning.”
This is true. And it cuts directly against the imposter syndrome that keeps a lot of people out of the darkroom in the first place. The barrier is psychological, not technical. You will not be doing it “wrong.” There is no one watching who knows the secret correct way that you are failing to do.
I have spent more time than I should have worrying that someone would look at my home darkroom efforts and tell me I was doing it wrong. Tim’s view: people will still tell you that you are wrong, but you do not have to listen to those people. This is a useful piece of darkroom philosophy.
Tim’s mission and Emily’s contribution
Worth pausing on this because it is the article’s reason for existing.
Tim is autistic, and he has spoken about how photography helped his own mental health by giving him a way to communicate without using words. The making of physical photographs, with his own hands, became a way to express things he could not say otherwise.
The mission of Negative Thinking comes directly from that experience. The pricing is not a business strategy. It is the principle that these processes are shared cultural heritage that everyone has a right to access. Tim refuses to charge more even when it would be financially sensible to do so. He does not want gatekeeping to be a feature of the space he runs.
Emily runs the operations side of things and is the reason the place actually functions as a business (in the loose sense of “covers its costs”). The relationship between mission and viability is a tension that Tim acknowledges openly. The place exists in spite of being economically unreasonable.
What I took home
A few things. Practical, philosophical, and about my own practice.
Practical: I now use the right enlarger lens for the format, start contrast at grade 2.5, use a grain magnifier with paper underneath, fix RC paper for 4 minutes and fibre paper for 6.
Philosophical: there is no wrong way to do this. The darkroom is an experimental space, even for experienced practitioners. Stop worrying about getting it right on the first try.
About my own practice: I had been guilty of treating the darkroom as optional. My workflow had been shoot film, scan negatives, edit in Lightroom, share digitally. I had told myself this was a legitimate analogue workflow.
It is not, really.
The darkroom is not an optional extra at the end of the film photography workflow. It is the medium the film was designed for. When I scan and share digitally, I am taking an analogue negative and converting it into a digital file that is then processed through digital tools. The “analogue purity” I thought I was maintaining was already broken at the scanning stage.
This realisation is part of what has pushed me to do more darkroom work since. The paper reversal experiments I started shortly after this session are partly inspired by it. The darkroom comparison of Lomography Berlin Kino and Lady Grey that I did later was directly motivated by Tim’s view that you cannot fully judge a film until you have printed it.
If you are someone who has been treating the darkroom as something other people do, find your nearest community darkroom and go use it. The barrier is genuinely low, the experience is genuinely useful, and the photographs you end up with are different from anything you can produce by scanning alone.
The fundraiser, which has now succeeded
When this video came out, Negative Thinking was facing closure. Their landlord had hiked the rent unexpectedly and they had been given a couple of months to find new premises. They had launched a crowdfunder to cover the costs of moving and rebuilding the darkroom in a new space.
Update: by the time you read this, the crowdfunder has hit its target and Negative Thinking is in new premises. They are still going. Tim taught Guy Bellingham wet plate collodion (which I covered in another article), and Bristol still has its community darkroom. This is genuinely good news.
If you want to support them anyway, any contributions now go toward community projects, including bringing photography to people who cannot easily afford to access it. Their website has details of workshops, booking, t-shirts, and other ways to chip in.
A more general point
The thing I have come to think about Negative Thinking is bigger than the specific darkroom.
Community spaces for analogue processes are quietly important. They keep skills alive that would otherwise be lost. They give people access to expensive equipment they could not personally afford. They create the connections that mean someone like Guy Bellingham can learn wet plate collodion from someone like Tim, and then go on to win international awards with it.
These spaces operate on margins so thin that they are always at risk. The places that price reasonably to fulfil their mission are the most at risk because they have no buffer for surprises like a rent hike.
If you are lucky enough to have a community darkroom nearby, go use it. Pay them what they charge, and pay it gratefully. Buy a t-shirt. Recommend them to other people. The future of these processes runs through the people who keep these spaces alive.
For Bristol and the West Country, that is Tim and Emily at Negative Thinking. For other regions, find your local equivalent and support it. The community spaces are the infrastructure for the entire analogue photography world. They deserve to exist.
Big thanks to Tim for the lesson and the conversation. I will be back, with my own paper, to make some more terrible test strips. By Tim’s view, that is what the darkroom is for.