from an essay by Tod Papageorge on photographer, Robert Adams...
"Adams worked from a suburban tract house in Longmont, a Denver suburb, where he had fashioned a small, unventilated darkroom in a spare bedroom. To develop the nearly five hundred rolls of film he exposed through his two years of photographing on this project, he employed a routine he had established while working on The New West. It involved the use of shallow custom-made trays and required that Adams make a loop of a single roll of film by taping its ends together and then manipulating it through several trays of photographic chemistry, all in pitch blackness. This procedure, requiring thirty-five to forty minutes start to finish, was more time-consuming (and finical) than that undertaken by beginning photography students developing their first negatives in plastic tanks, and considerably more so than that employed by experienced photographers developing, in larger tanks, up to four rolls of the same type of film, or even eighteen, in another, trickier procedure employing yet another kind of tank and steel racks. But for Adams, this painstaking process was essential, because, more than any other technique he knew, it promised that his negatives would have smooth, unmottled development, allowing the sky areas of his bright prints to appear seamless as they burned away at the high end of the photographic tonal scale toward absolute, paper white."
