Quote:
Originally Posted by miketoll
........................... One last point, we are all agreed that the final piccie is what counts but you also admit you have never worked in the wet darkroom and printed your photos under an enlarger. That means that you have handed over your picture to someone else to do at least half the process of producing the picture you want and he puts your film in an automated machine. If you are truly going to get the most out of your photography then you need to have control of the whole process from start to finish. Use film by all means and enjoy it but set up your own darkroom, us oldies have done it and enjoyed it but my old Durst stands rather forlorn in a corner because digital is far easier, gives more control, and is repeatable without the risk of destroying the original which can all too easily happen when developing the negative or slide. Darkroom work is fun but can be very frustrating and expensive when chasing a colour cast because the temperature is not quite right or constant. When you are in control of everything from start to finish you feel far more of a real photographer whether you use digital or film.
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Well said Mike.
The biggest plus of digital is the ease of processing your own images once you have a glimmer of understanding of how the imaging program works. So long since I had a machine print done but I do recall how impressed I was with my first darkroom print when I compared it with the lab job.
I gave up colour neg due to the fact that each time I went to print I had to recalbrate the enlarger as the paper had changed. Shed loads of wasted paper, lost time and sheer frustration. Then again I could not afford a pukka colour analyser. Hence going to Cibachrome from slide for colour. Ciba paper was very stable and the colour wheel settings were accurately printed on each pack.
The next big issue was multiple prints from a single tranny. For work I could do two at a time in my bit of drain, but after each it had to be washed and thoroughly dried before the next. A straight run of 30 6x4's could take nearly 6 hours from initial chemical mix to final wash and tidy up.
Even some B&W that I recieved requests for were a bit of a nightmare to replicate due to the amount of dodging and burning required to near match the origional. Computer linked printing is so easy as its just a case of printing the processed and saved copy.
Makes you wonder if photography would have been so widely taken up if there was no commercial processing available back in the day.
Don