Because I enjoy experimenting and often look for inspiration online for new crazy ideas, I decided this time to focus on photos taken with a mobile phone. I believe that even with a phone, you can take a good photo, and it also shows a different, almost opposite path—from digital to analog. Yes, analog photography is coming back into the spotlight; it’s a matter of fashion. But most photographers and the general photography community only have their film developed and scanned, then printed. I sometimes choose that option too, and often it’s just a matter of laziness. But it only shares the first half with real analog photography. Then there are a few crazies who enlarge their photos in a darkroom themselves. I count myself among them 🙂
Mobile photos can also be printed on a printer if you want a physical copy. Let’s be honest—photos on the cloud or stored on a drive may look nice, but having a photograph in your hand or displayed somewhere is, at least for me, the best solution. If I wanted to do an exhibition, I could hardly exhibit memory cards or a screen with a cloud-based photo. When I’m in a mood where I don’t want to be online, I pick up a classic printed photograph. It’s a physical connection—something you can’t replace. You’re holding that photo in your hands, and you can look at it anytime, whenever you see it. In daylight, by a lamp, even by candlelight (not ideal, I know), I can view the image I captured with my camera. I can look at a two-dimensional picture that I carved out of a three-dimensional world. Even though a physical photograph is technically a 3D object 🙂
I decided to try whether it’s possible to enlarge a photo taken with a mobile phone directly onto photo paper—without a printer—using the original chemical process.
No, it’s not my original idea. I’m sure someone has tried it before, and I must have seen it somewhere. But seeing something and trying it yourself are two completely different things.
And now the technical part. As you can see in the photo, I removed the part with the mask for negatives from the enlarger and inserted a brightly lit mobile phone showing the selected image. I set the enlarger to the desired size and focused on a white surface. With the lens fully open (aperture 4.5), the exposure time was about 15 seconds. I used expired RC paper from Foma and tested my favorite developer—HC 110 (typically used for negatives)—for the positive process. The result really surprised me. When I looked at the final enlarged photo under a magnifier, the individual pixels from the phone’s display were clearly visible and sharp. I probably won’t be doing this every day, but it was definitely worth trying.
