How Long It Actually Takes to Make One Perfect Darkroom Print

Slowing down and making a single print from start to finish is one of the hardest things to do when you shoot a lot. Most people never get there, not because they lack the skill, but because the habit of moving on to the next shot is almost impossible to break.

Coming to you from Ari Jaaksi - I Shoot On Film, this thoughtful video follows Jaaksi through the entire process of taking one photograph, a lakeside image he shot a few months prior, and turning it into a finished, framed print. He starts with paper selection, choosing between Ilford Multigrade RC 300 and Foma Fomabrom 112, two fiber-based papers with very different characters. He lands on the Ilford, partly because of its texture and slight golden hue, which shapes almost every decision that follows, including the color of the window mount. That golden cast rules out a white mount entirely; it would make the print look dirty rather than warm.

The darkroom work alone takes four to six hours. Jaaksi makes trial print after trial print, adjusting contrast, dodging, and burning until the image starts to match what he actually wants, not just what he imagined when he took the shot. He's direct about the fact that fresh chemicals are non-negotiable at this stage. Using tired chemistry to save time is how you waste a full day on mediocre results. Once he has prints he likes, he washes them in a print washer that circulates water automatically, flattens them under a stack of books for a few days, and then begins spotting out the dust marks left by the negative with black and gray paint. It's slow, exacting work, and he clearly enjoys it.

The framing decisions are just as deliberate. Jaaksi orders custom window mounts from a local frame shop rather than cutting them himself, and in this case he stacks two mounts on top of each other to give the final piece a subtle three-dimensional quality. He reaches for a dark walnut frame, inexpensive but well-suited to the warm tones of the paper and the mount, and uses an antistatic record cleaner to pull dust off the glass before assembling everything. The whole package, from negative to framed print, takes six to eight hours. The result is a single photograph he describes as one of the best things he's ever made, with no exhibition, no wall space, and no buyer lined up. He made it because it deserved the attention.

That framing is worth sitting with. Jaaksi isn't arguing that everyone should print less or work slower as a philosophy. He's showing what happens when you actually do it, concretely, with one specific image, and what the process demands at each step. The video doesn't romanticize darkroom work; it just documents it honestly, including the trial prints that don't work and the hardware workarounds for flattening fiber-based paper without a dedicated print dryer. Check out the video above for the full framing and assembly process from Jaaksi.