I've been travelling with a friend who used to carry a low-cost 6x6 darkroom-in-a-suitcase and a Flexaret. Here's a couple of tips from the experience:
- The best thing about a mobile darkroom IMHO is not having instant contact prints available, but keeping a regularly updated photo diary of prints while you travel. This is not only enormous fun, but you also reflect on your journey and it's a great conversation piece. Get an empty photo book and just put the prints in there as you make them, and take notes of where and when you took a picture and where and when you developed it in the corners of the pages 🙂
- If you want to keep your setup light and small, don't do large formats. If you want to do 8x10" proof sheets, you have to carry an 8x10" pack of paper, one to three 8x10" trays and either an 8x10" contact printing frame or an 8x10" glass plate. My friend ended up doing contact prints of individual 6x6 negatives on 9x13cm paper, which was much more portable: a pack of 100 sheets of 9x13cm is smaller than a paperback book, trays are small, the frame is light. His darkroom fit in an attaché case except the film development drum.
- Contact printing frames are overrated IMHO. A glass plate will do. You can also take one of those small clip-on frames with you which consist of a board and a glass plate. Put in the paper, put the negative on top of it, clip the glass on top of the package, and you're ready for exposure.
- Trivial, but important: choose your chemistry carefully. For film use a one-shot developer where you don't have to carry an extra bottle of working solution with you. For paper see how many times you will change location, to see if you want to carry working solution around with you or not. Powder developer is more compact, but you either again have to carry the working solution with you or open a new package of powder at each new darkroom location, so get developer in small packages - using only parts of a bag of powder is risky at best, because if the powder consists of a mix of multiple substances these are likely to unmix in the bag.
- Exposure can be done with switching the light on and off. Not particularly precise. If you want more precision (my friend didn't) take a step wedge with you, do a contact print off the step wedge and then you will have a reference value how bright your hotel room's bulb is. If you don't need precision, just guess exposure and then develop to sight. 🙂
- Even if you expose by switching the light on and off, you will still want a safelight. You can take a bulb with you, or build yourself a battery-powerd red LED safelight if you're into electronics, or take some of the filter foils used in some darkroom safelights and put them in front of a flashlight.
- POP paper is great fun and gives amazing prints. For proof sheets it's a waste of money, though. You need hypo fixer, which you can buy in the form of crystals or powder. (IIRC this is one of the powders where you can actually use part of a bag because it's only one substance.). POP paper is a fibre-based paper, though, so you need some solution for drying your prints.
Philipp
EDIT: cleared up terminology in two cases and a couple of grammatical errors, the joy of not being a native speaker.
