[leicaman]

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It just boggles the mind to think of what you used to need to do that we can do with a few clicks in Photoshop (or Aperture) today. I don't think I would have had the patience for it.

Oh, it was no problem. I miss working in the darkroom. It was great fun leaving the basketball or football game at 8:50, make it back to the paper, process the film, dry it, edit it, make three prints and run down three flights of stairs and hand them to the sports editor by 9:35. Then write captions, talk to the city desk, and get home by 10 p.m. Only problem was I was usually so jazzed by it that I couldn't get to sleep for a while. :p :grin:There is a craft to working in the darkroom that is completely different than working with Photoshop. Not that I would go back to it. Photoshop means better quality, more perfect images than ever with film. It's a joy to use, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the photographic process as well. (Printing, not processing.)

[Rick LePage]

Spending so much time with digital cameras the past few years has rekindled my love of film and the darkroom. My daughter is a photography major at a school in Boston, and she loves the darkroom - she's spending more time printing there than she is doing anything digital. Of course, having your own enlarger helps - the high school she went to had two enlargers for the whole school.

I've been shooting a bunch of film this fall on some of my rangefinders - I'm waiting for my daughter to come home, so we can go do some developing/printing at a nice community darkroom space here in Portland. She says she's learned a few new tricks.

We'll probably do some scanning, too... :)

[cpoff]

Just a reminder that HTML is enabled and UBB Code is disabled in the Creative Space forums.

So you may want to add line break or paragraph tags to clean up text, and the blockquote HTML tag is a good substitute for UBB Code's 'Quote' function.

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Cheers,
Curt

[whitedog]

I can't say I was ever an "expert" in the darkroom but I spent hundreds of hours "playing" in the darkroom in the hobby center of the student union when I was in college - oh so many years ago. Now even some junior colleges have decent photography departments and I'm glad to see they are still teaching the old skills. Still, once I found Photoshop I gladly left the darkroom behind. But, in my opinion, you can grasp what the computer is doing more readily if you've had some experience doing it the old fashioned way. What do f-stops, shutter speeds and ISO mean to a digital photographer whose never used a film camera? Just abstract numbers. How about the kelvin value of light? There is absolutely nothing you can learn about film photography that isn't relevant to digital.Nevertheless, I suspect that in a few years when the "old hands" have passed on that film and darkroom photography will be found only among hobbyists. It's quaint and interesting but expensive, time consuming and inefficient, not to mention hazardous to the environment. Digital tools are just too powerful. Now that the quality of the digital image is comparable to film in most respects, the supremacy of digital imaging is inevitable.One thing working in a darkroom and on a computer have in common, though, is isolation - in the best sense of the word. Your focus on your work is nearly absolute and time all but disappears. No doubt this is a good source of endorphins, which might account for why we don't notice how tired we are till we stop working.

[moose_n_squirrel]

Absolutely not true.
F-stops, shutter speeds, and ISO have exactly the same meaning on my digital SLR and lenses as they do on my film SLR. If film cameras disappeared, you could observe just as well on a digital SLR what happens when you open the lens aperture, and observe that if you use a higher ISO you get higher sensitivity and higher grain/noise. It's the same as film. To say otherwise is merely to emotionally romanticize film.

[Philbert]

If I understand his point correctly, I don't believe whitedog is saying the general principals of photography don't apply to digital (they certainly do), but that those with a traditional "film background" will have better understanding of photography overall than those who have only shot digital. I would have to agree with that. Who would have a better understanding of the "digital darkroom", than someone who has experience in an actual wet darkroom?

Every single aspect of "digital" photography is based on the ways of film - that's the reason minor (and major) photography schools still incorporate film-based studies in one way or another.

[WarrenMa]

Pigment based inks are water-fast on most any media, including plain paper.Dye based inks will generally run when wetted on anything except a specially coated photo paper

[Gerard5819]

I want to print out more A-3 pictures: however, the cost on Ink is just too much on my Epson R1800. I always wonder is it possible to purchase Ink in bulk along with photo pater from the same brand, if I could only proof my printer, scanner, and screen on my computer for this setup I would stay with it. I recon it would give good results as a large batch should be able to maintain its body better than these small cartridges all from different batches. My question is, how do I go about this, and is there any software on the market that will help with proofing. Can software like Silverfast-ICC Printer Calibration do this or is it more complicated than that. Again, I am learning, as I go, so a little help along the way would be nice. By the way, articles like you write help a lot for beginners like me.
Gerard.