Jagglé – Introducing my Daylight Enlarger

First, let me introduce myself; I am a mechanical design engineer and amateur photographer living in Potsdam, Germany. I’m 32 years old and have grown up around cameras, as both my parents are enthusiastic photographers. I never stopped shooting film, and only got a digital camera 6 years ago.

Whilst doing my masters in Manchester, I saw an ad from Kamerastore for an engineer to draw spare parts for them. This was my first step into the professional side of photography, albeit as an engineer, not a photographer. Through Kamerastore, I got in contact with Arild, and we started Valoi together.At Valoi I was responsible for the technical design work, concept creation as well as a large portion of sourcing the parts and communication with the suppliers. After my masters I moved to Germany to become head of engineering at Adox. At Adox I was working as chief of engineering, responsible for coordinating the team, organising maintenance schedules, designing new machinery, like the coating machine, as well as restoring the old machines back to life. Time showed that doing both Adox and Valoi, as well as having a normal life, was not possible, so I left Valoi in good spirits. After some time, however, the entrepreneurial bug got me again, and I started thinking about a new project. I guess it’s no surprise to you that it was all about analogue photography again.

From my childhood, I remember that we were printing every roll on 10×15 cm, and the 13×18 format was reserved for the best shots. My father often told me about the magic of being in a darkroom and creating the prints on your own. It’s an artistic extension of the whole photographing process and strongly inspired both my and my father’s approach to analogue photography and exposure.

Even though we had all the gear in the house, we never had the space, time or dedication to set up the darkroom, so this remained an elusive dream for me. Later, when dev + print 10×15 became a lot more expensive and scanners and Instagram made their way into my life, the physical aspect of photography became more and more restricted to the act of developing my BNW films. And I always found something was lacking in that. Why shoot film if the result is digital?

So, while talking with my colleagues and friends and pondering ideas for starting a business, the idea of an enlarger that does not need a darkroom was born. The design process seemed straightforward enough but turned out to be more complicated than expected, as expected.

The aim was to create a device that can:

• Print and develop without the need for a darkroom
• Print different formats of film and paper
• And is affordable enough to take your first steps in printing

The initial idea phase had many additional thoughts: Can I introduce printing of all roll film formats, 135 through  120? Can I print paper sizes from 10×15 to 20×25? Unfortunately, this had to be shrunk to a starter version that can only print 135 film on 10×15 and 13×18 paper.

The next problem was moving parts; if you introduce moving parts, you increase complexity, part count and chances for user error while raising the price. So, I opted for a design with a fixed focus. This mandated the use of a standardised lens, so the search was on for a lens that met both the quality and price criteria of the project. Unfortunately, I found nothing in the market that met the requirements, so I searched for a partner in optical design and manufacturing to create a bespoke lens. I found a fantastic company in the UK that has created a great lens for the project, which is undoubtedly an asset to the company as it opens up so many other possibilities.

The last aspect of the enlarger was the ability to develop the paper in daylight. Initially, there were, of course, exciting and crazy ideas; can we put a 10-pack of paper in the enlarger and develop the sheets 1 by 1? Is it possible to make it daylight loading? But also the unuseful, integrating the paper compartment into the enlarger as a fixed part. In the end, I designed it as an interchangeable cassette + tray which moves the paper from the “exposure compartment” to the “development compartment” in the tray by means of pulling out a second darkslide. This concept was received very well by a group of peers, with the immediate question: does it work in a large format camera? So now the cassettes are compatible with the Graflok system of double film cassettes, and the cassette without tray fits behind the spring-loaded ground glass of a standard large format camera.

I am really humbled by all the excitement and positive feedback I’ve received on this project. I am looking forward to seeing it out there and witnessing what everyone gets up to! We are planning

a Kickstarter to start on the 16th of October and are looking forward to all of your support!

Find the project everywhere:

Our website
On Tiktok 
On Instagram
On Facebook

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