Yesterday was the day I booked with Photofusion, based in south London, to use their darkroom facilities for my recent college project.

It started off with a feeling of anticipation as it was the first time I use the darkroom there, having previously used the college's own facility. But then the day soon started taking a turn for the worse. Firstly, I was travelling by underground (commonly known as the tube over here in England) then the circle line decided to have severe delays due to a signal failure at Gloucester Road station, followed by problems at Victoria Station where the Victoria Line did not stop at all that day...causing further delays and forcing everyone who wanted to continue on the Victoria Line to take a replacement bus service to the next station and THEN carry on from there to the destination, in my case it was Brixton station.

Total journey time: 2 hours!

Next comes the darkroom experience. The enlargers were all electronic in contrast to the college ones in which you just insert the grade squares into place and can actually see a difference when you change the f stop setting. But the photofusion ones, both the grades and exposure times were controlled by an electronic control panel which I found largely confusing. Furthermore, usually when you need to correctly focus the image onto the paper, the enlarger has a red light to allow you to safely find the optimum sharpness with that little microscope-like instrument (I forget the name). However it seems this red light actually lets light through, so I was puzzled when I found an outline of the base of the instrument and it's shadow imprinted on the image.

To cut a story short, it was a less than enjoyable experience!