I walked into the kitchen, thinking hard about my portrait assignment, and nearly bumped into Janine. "What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Professor Woodley doesn't need me until two today," she said, "so I came home to have a quick lunch and pick up my notebook."

I made us a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches, and we ate together without talking much. I was still thinking about my new ideas, and Janine was poring over columns of figures in her notebook. She barely lifted her head when I cleared my plate and told her I would be in the darkroom for awhile.

I went up to our bathroom and began to assemble all the things I would need for developing my roll of film. First, I set up my dock radio, dialing in my favorite station and making sure the dock was turned so I could see it while the film developed. Keeping track of time is an essential part of working in a darkroom. Then I got out all my chemicals and measuring cups and set them up, along with my thermometer (the temperature of the chemicals is important, too), my developing tank, my bottle opener (to pry the top off the film canister), and my scissors (to cut off the end of the film).

r

I know it sounds like a complicated process, but really, developing film is incredibly easy. The most important thing is to have total — and I mean total —r darkness while you're loading the film into a developing tank. You can load film in a lighted room, by using a changing bag, which is a rubberized sack with places to put your hands in. But it’s not easy to rumble around in there with the reels and the bottle opener and all that. I'd rather load film in a lightproof room, and my dad and I had made sure that the bathroom, which doesn't have any windows, was as lightproof as possible. All I had to do to make it totally dark was shove a towel into the crack at the bottom of the door and turn off the lights.

Which is what I did. Then, in the pitch-dark, I sat on my stool next to the counter, and felt around for the film and all my equipment. Since I had set things up so carefully, it only took me a few minutes to get the film out of the can and loaded onto the reel. I had just dropped the reel into the developing tank, knowing that as soon as I put on the lid, the tank would be lightproof and I could turn on the lights, when I heard a tapping at the door.