SimonWeber
This isn’t directly related to photographic materials or their processing, but it might be of interest to others too.
I’d like to know if there’s any research on how harmful handling chemicals, inhaling chemical fumes, etc., can be to one’s health in the long term. I’m 22 and have been working in various photo labs for the past 2½ years. At home, where ventilation is poor, and at university in a lab with ventilation, etc.
Is there anyone who has been working with black-and-white analogue photography for a very long time who has personal experience of this, or perhaps even studies on the subject? Are there any reports from other photographers? I sometimes feel sick in my poorly ventilated home lab when I’m pottering about there for hours on end.
I’d just like to know whether, after 30 years of photography (in 2033... will analogue photography even still exist by then? ;) ), I’ll have ruined my health, or whether, with sensible handling (what would that be?), the whole thing is manageable (I hope so...).
Just a side note.
Simon
Manfred
Hello!
I’ve been working with Duka for over 40 years. If you follow the instructions, you’ll be fine, but proper ventilation is absolutely essential. Working whilst suffering from headaches or dizziness is certainly unhealthy in the long run.
Best regards,
Manfred
MirkoBoeddecker
Hi Simon,
Working in the darkroom is actually relatively safe as long as you take all the necessary precautions.
Inhaling the fumes from the developer isn’t directly harmful to your health, and your headache is probably down to working intently for hours on end in a small, poorly ventilated room.
There is a difference between inhaling odours and coming into contact with the chemicals themselves. Perhaps a doctor or Franz might know more about this?
However, there are things that can be dangerous, and unfortunately, they are still far too often overlooked.
So here is a short list (no guarantee of completeness).
1) Cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness! If you don’t wipe up any leftover developer or fixer, they’ll dry out and turn into fine dust. If you also have poor ventilation, there’s a high risk that you’ll inhale this dust, and then you won’t just have odours but actual photographic chemicals with all their substances in your lungs. That has the same effect as if you were dipping your fingers into the developer. Cleanliness also helps to keep processes stable, make the chemicals last longer and prevent dust from getting onto your photos.
2) Some developers can trigger allergies. Personally, as someone with allergies, I would always wear latex gloves (available from pharmacies or medical supply shops) when conducting film development. They cost next to nothing and offer almost 100% protection. Alternatively, you can also use developers that do not contain any allergenic substances. They are a bit more expensive, but when you break it down per roll of film, it’s not that bad.
3) Heavy metals such as selenide compounds can actually accumulate in fatty tissue and, over many years, damage your health. Other substances either poison you immediately or are excreted from the body. That is why we always advise that selenium toner should only be carried out in a well-ventilated area and that you should not dip your fingers into the toner.
However, there are thousands of photographers around the world who have had their fingers and skin literally blackened by selenide and Amidol, who have dipped their fingers into toners all their lives and who have died of natural causes at an advanced age.
Just so you don’t get ‘hypochondriacal’. Sucking petrol out of a pipe with your mouth is also dangerous, but damage only sets in if you’ve had petrol in your mouth for years.
4) Dissolving powder chemicals. Important point!
Dissolving powdered chemicals is no small matter. If you tip the bag into the water with a swing from a height of 50 cm, a cloud of fine chemical dust swirls up, spreading as far as 1.5 metres in all directions. You then breathe in all that muck.
That is why chemists use those ventilated fume hoods when handling powdered chemicals. I really recommend wearing a face mask and stirring SLOWLY and carefully. Alternatively: use liquid chemicals.
5) Use laboratory forceps. Do not touch the chemicals with your bare hands or use latex gloves (perhaps we should add them to our range).
6) As a general rule, buying products that do not contain hydroquinone or other harmful substances minimises the risk of harm to health. Unfortunately, the alternative accelerators are more expensive, and not every desired result can be achieved using other recipes. So this is a good option for school laboratories if you want to play it absolutely safe, but it’s not really a one-size-fits-all alternative.
As I said, everything above is without any guarantee of completeness and, of course, without warranty.
It would be great if others could contribute to this post.
I’m no pharmacologist, after all.
Best regards,
Mirko
RomanJRohleder
Simon, Mirko,
First of all: Happy New Year.
>Working in the DUKA is actually relatively safe if you take all >the necessary precautions.
Exactly. It’s just like driving a car, swimming in an outdoor pool and baking small rolls.
>Inhaling the fumes from the developer isn’t directly harmful to your health, and >your headache is probably down to working intently for hours on end in a small room >with poor ventilation.
Right. I know this from my first darkroom – 3m² without any fresh air or ventilation really wears you down after 3, 6 or 9 hours. Back then, I always felt like I was coming down with the flu...
>There’s a difference between inhaling fumes and coming into direct contact with all the chemicals. Perhaps a doctor or Franz might know more about this?
That’s true.
The main problem with the conventional black-and-white process, in my humble opinion, is the sulphur dioxide – we introduce an admittedly dilute acetic acid solution into the fixer via carry-over (and carry-over of developer into the stop bath), which then releases SO2 over time. And that leads, among other things, to headaches.
My solution: a larger darkroom with an air/electric heat pump inside – the thing’s exhaust air flow is enough to ventilate a small sports hall. ;-)
Alternative: set up ventilation, take regular breathing breaks whilst cross-ventilating the darkroom, and thoroughly shake the sheet after the stop bath. Or throw out the acidic stop bath and replace it with a running water rinse.
The Calbe FX-R has also proven itself as a fixer; it no longer smells sour, but it does have a whiff of ammonia. Never mind.
>That’s why chemists have those ventilated fume hoods under which they handle >powdered chemicals. I really recommend a face mask and S L O W >and careful stirring. Alternatively: use liquid chemicals.
Cut open the bag, dip the corner under water and let it slide out. Once the bag is “mostly empty”, rinse it out with a splash of water and take it straight to the bin as soon as it’s empty.
Right, this can be a bit of a hassle with some Calbe bags; I once had two 10-litre N113 bags where the corners weren’t sealed properly and the mixture ran out all over the place. <g>
>5) Use laboratory forceps.
Are there actually any replacements available now for the plastic-coated ones? That solution involving dipping them in liquid plastic wasn’t exactly thrilling; the stuff is still sticky even after a year, and the stroke – the opening width of the forceps jaws alone – causes problems.
> Do not touch the chemicals or use latex gloves (perhaps we should add them to our range).
But let’s get down to brass tacks – latex is cheaper, available locally and in greater quantities (spread the word!) at any chemist’s, whereas not every chemist stocks nitrile on their shelves.
>6) As a general rule, buying products that do not contain hydroquinone or other harmful substances minimises the risk of damage to health.
I don’t see that as a problem; it’s the same debate as with particulate matter, just applied to the field of occupational health and safety.
>It would be nice if others could contribute to this post.
>I’m no pharmacologist, after all.
Neither am I. <g>
>Best regards,
>Mirko
Likewise, have a good rest of 2006,
Roman
Gast
Hello,
I’ve been doing darkroom work for three years now, often quite intensively. And, believe it or not, I’m still alive. For many years, I also used to handle the chemicals with my bare hands. That didn’t ‘set anything off’ for me. I just needed a third hand for the fresh photographic paper.
In a dingy darkroom, the increased carbon dioxide concentration is probably the biggest problem. So take a break every so often and air the room out. There’s also no reason not to use liquid chemicals and avoid hydroquinone. Tweezers prevent fixing fingerprints on the prints, and your dry hands are free to practise your dodging skills.
I have stainless steel tweezers from Mirko, with plastic-coated tips. They’re brilliant. The plastic tweezers keep snapping on me.
Stagirit
In a darkroom without ventilation, the lack of oxygen eventually becomes quite unpleasant, so make sure you air it out properly every now and then.
The photochemicals (and other chemicals too) have left the skin on my hands a bit rough, so I have to apply cream more often, especially in winter.
Vinyl gloves are much more comfortable for people with allergies than latex ones, and latex gloves tend to develop small holes and tears through which the chemicals can seep into the gloves.
Apart from the accelerators (phenidone and the others), photochemistry in itself is no more unhealthy than a lunch at McDonald’s.
Toner and Bleach bath are a completely different matter; I’d be careful with those. That said, selenium itself isn’t particularly toxic; under normal laboratory conditions, you can’t ingest a quantity harmful to your health. Selenium is actually an important trace element in the body. The lungs can be directly damaged by larger quantities, which manifests as selenium rhinitis, a sign of acute poisoning.
The potassium dichromate in the bleach bath worries me more.
cfb_de
Hi there,
Here are some practical, rather than theoretical, tips from me for the new year (Simon, I’m a chemist and an expert witness; just so you know where my standard German comes from).
- Danger. This is ever-present and threatens people in all sorts of ways: driving, eating, working in a Duka, right down to ‘being struck by lightning whilst on the loo’.
- Risk mitigation. The way intelligent people deal with danger. E.g. through flight responses, risk-aware behaviour or ignorance (often observed whilst driving).
You should be practising risk mitigation. Very good and quite right. So make sure you ventilate your darkroom at home regularly: Get out every now and then, leave the door open, allow air to circulate (the vinegar stench from the stop bath isn’t really a problem; more critical are sulphur dioxide/hydrogen sulphide emissions from developer/fixer/toner and – particularly – the oxygen deficiency that eventually sets in – then you’ll start to feel tired or just produce poor prints).
So:
- Make sure you use as few powder mixtures as possible: powder mixtures always create a bit of dust, and you always inhale some. If you don’t want that, put on a filter mask (from a DIY store; the fleece filters will do).
- Store your chemicals properly! So not in the fridge next to the ketchup and potatoes. Not in old apple juice bottles (old Eukobrom looks quite similar and there have been incidents at the chemist’s...).
- Keep your floss clean! Paper tweezers are not a pointless invention and hydroquinone *can* (but doesn’t have to!) have a mutagenic effect.
- Only ever use “smelly” sulphur toner in very well-ventilated areas!
- Avoid making your own selenium toner from metallic selenium.
- Wear gloves for certain things (chromates, for example). Always read the safety data sheets (available from the chemical manufacturer, online or, if necessary, by post on request) and follow them as closely as possible.
- Don’t worry! The vast majority of “poisonings” and “work-related allergies” are simply imagined and psychologically induced.
- Avoid daguerreotype processes involving development in mercury vapour.
For X decades/almost two centuries, photographic laboratories have been operating with a minimum of chemicals. And there is no evidence of any significant difference in life expectancy among photographers. Except, of course, for the idiots who drink the stuff or suffocate/burn themselves in the darkroom. Or those who (as is common among artists) are correspondingly more likely to take their own lives.
The impact of five portions of chips or ten packets of instant soup on your life expectancy is likely to be greater than that of twenty years of properly run photo labs. And when it comes to chips and instant soup, nobody gets any nasty ideas, neither the consumers nor the lawmakers. I’m just going to go ahead and claim that a packet of crisps is roughly equivalent to ten hours spent directly over the selenium toner bowl. And you’d be hard pressed to manage ten hours spent directly over the bowl within your life expectancy, as your common sense stands in the way of that. Unlike with the crisps.
Was that German enough? I hope so. I really can’t be bothered to work out the respective risk potentials for these pointlessly low exposure doses.
The most serious damage to the survival of the human race caused by Duka-watching is likely to lie in the fact that long Duka evenings are addictive, leaving hardly any time (or, in the partner’s case, willingness) for procreation ;-)
Best regards,
Franz, in a German-speaking, down-playing mood today :-)
SimonWeber
Well, that’s wonderful – it really puts my mind at rest. I’d already suspected that the effects of ageing from chemical fumes in the darkroom were more of a psychosomatic nature than acute poisoning causing genetic damage and a near-death experience ;) . Nevertheless, I’ll follow Mirko’s/Franz’s/Roman’s suggestions, particularly with regard to powder chemistry (Emofin!).
Roman (or Franz, as a chemist): Would using a citric acid stop bath perhaps help against sulphur dioxide? (I did do chemistry once, but ...)
In any case, many thanks for all your reports!
I hadn’t planned on daguerreotype either, at first :P ... I’d rather stick with Fox Talbot and his negative-positive process. And I’ve had far too much of MacDonald’s as well... probably better not to go there anymore and invest the money saved in selenium, uranium or plutonium toner.
Best regards,
Simon
And of course, Happy New Year 2006!
cfb_de
Hello Simon,
> Would using a citric acid stop bath perhaps help with sulphur dioxide?
No, that doesn’t help at all. It just means it doesn’t smell of vinegar anymore. But using a different stop bath doesn’t change the basic chemistry of sulphite in the developer or fixer in the slightest.
That said, even under normal circumstances, sulphite emissions from the trays remain quite low and are made more than unpleasant by standard laboratory ventilation.
Provided, of course, that you have/use laboratory ventilation.
Best regards,
Franz
piu58
Roman (or Franz, as a chemist): Would using a citric acid stop bath perhaps help against sulphur dioxide? (I did study chemistry once, but ...)
And of course, Happy New Year 2006!
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At least if you’re working with PE paper, you can get by quite well with water as an intermediate bath. PE develops in 60–90 seconds and then remains (essentially) the same. An extra 10 seconds of (partial) development doesn’t alter the final image.
To avoid carrying too much developer and hydroxide into the fixer, change the water every now and then. For example, during the ventilation break that’s necessary anyway. And buy a large tray for the water; I use a 30x40 cm tray.
Stagirit
Another way to avoid sulphites in the lab is to avoid eating beans or cabbage beforehand. ;)
cfb_de
;) :) :D
Gast
Good morning,
One more point:
Mould growth in a hobby laboratory can also be a significant issue. After all, permanent (hobby) laboratories are usually small, enclosed rooms that are light-tight and therefore airtight too. Without ventilation, the air cannot circulate and, due to the handling of liquids, is saturated with moisture. These are ideal living conditions for mould spores.
After Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, several workers subsequently died from mysterious infections. Plausible scientific investigations suggest that the ‘Curse of the Pharaoh’ may have been caused by spores that had accumulated over 2,000 years.
Although a darkroom is generally opened more frequently, I believe one should therefore ensure good ventilation between sessions as well.
Regards
Dierk
