Mrs Wilson and I decided to be brave for our final session. We planned to create a pop-up darkroom in the classroom. I brought chemicals and and extra safelight and some trays for the chemicals. I introduced the class to the idea and they were very excited. They helped to dilute the chemicals and set up the store-room and vied for access for the test-strip trial to see if everything was working. This was our result -we were in business. Throughout the rest of the day small groups came into the store and set up photograms and watched them appear in the developer then carefully used the stop, fix and wash baths to allow the images to be brought out into the light. It was a most exciting day. There were oohs and ahhs from the outset when the images appeared and the excitement didn’t abate at all. Each group had to organise themselves and have all of their objects composed before they came into the darkroom. The children really liked the stark black and white images and mostly chose to use opaque objects to create quite graphic patterns. We thought a lot about composition and rhythm. Despite the excitement it was very calm in the darkroom.

Outside in the classroom, the group were working with the spinning discs, taking more photographs and beginning to experiment with cyanotypes. More of that later.