survey digital vs traditional darkroom

[Neal Shields]

100% wet darkroom for photographs. Digital for snapshots.

Photography is a hobby for me and I want the best output I can get. I have run tests and you simply can not get as much information to paper with digital processes.

Because most comercial color printing is going to 300dpi which translates to about 6 lp/mm I am transitioning from 4x5 color and black and white to 8x10 black and white contact prints. (Just about the time I had my 4x5 set up where I wanted it after about 10 years of watching Ebay.)

Note: I hold 10 US patents spaning both mechanical and electrical so I am not a ludite. On the contrary, I think I understand the limitations of digital better than most which is why I am still with film.

Beyond that as a matter of taste, I just don't like digital printing especially the off axis look to ink jet.

[Marko]

Note: I hold 10 US patents spaning both mechanical and electrical so I am not a ludite. On the contrary, I think I understand the limitations of digital better than most which is why I am still with film.

Neal, it is neither their education nor their preference that makes certain people luddites, it is their active opposition to a particular technology. Choice is good, and the choices we have are great because they are not mutually exclusive. Technology, on the other hand, is neither good nor bad, it just is. What we do with it, or not, can be good or bad, but depends very little on technology and quite a lot on us.

Photography is a hobby for me too, and I want to enjoy it, feel good while I'm doing it and simply have fun. I am doing both digital and film and enjoying both, since they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

[vann webb]

Anything done for business purposes, which is primarily destined for the web is digital.

For my personal stuff, it's all traditional darkroom. Count me in with the crowd that spends all day on a computer. It's hard to get fired up to spend more hours in front of it when I have leisure time. Plus, it's like starting over in a lot of ways. The photoshop curve is pretty steep for me. As long as I can get the materials that I want, and the results that I want, I will probably keep plugging away in the dark.

[evan clarke]

2 years ago, 100% digital. I am back in the darkroom and am now 100% wet..EC

[emo supremo]

One vote for the lab geeks: 90 percent darkroom because the research grade equipment still depends on 3x4 or 4x5 ortho film to acquire data. the negs from these scopes are scanned for reports and publication. It's impt to note to grad students that journals will not accept photographs anymore. I mention it because someone has to teach these guys how negs are made.

[JBrunner]

Commercial/consumer -80% digital, 20% chrome, once in a great while, black and white. The film shooting happens more often with the high buck high profile client.

Art- 95% traditional. The 5% is the occasional digital negative.

[Joe Smigiel]

"On the film side, I have been moving OPPOSITE to the way photography evolved! I started with 35 mm, moved to 120, then to sheet film. Now I am venturing into tintypes.
If I keep moving in this direction, within a few years I will be drawing on cave walls with charcoal !!!! :-)>
--Calamity Jane, 2005-02-21 11:38:49 "

Same here. I'm seriously considering taking up wet collodian. BTW, CJ, I saw your portable darkroom page briefly today. I'll have to check it out in more detail as I'll need one for the field if I start doing wetplate. Have you broken it in with a field run yet?

As far as the original question, a few years ago I dabbled in Photoshop and digital maging and actually initiated a course (Digital Photography I) at the local community college where I teach. After a year I couldn't stand it and left it behind. So, I went from about 50/50 digital/traditional back to 10% digital 90% traditional in the past year. I only use digital now for quick web things and for making digital negatives for alternative process printing.

[Ralph Barker]

I'm probably 80% traditional film/darkroom and 20% digital, trending toward more traditional. (I don't include scanning for presentation purposes in that comparison.)

[Robert Skeoch]

I run a commercial studio and we are 100% digital, in fact there isn't even a film camera on the property.
My personel work is B&W landscape.... I try to set aside 1 day a week for my landscape work.... split between shooting, souping, work proofs and final b&w prints.
At the studio we have a Epson 10600 printer so every once and a while I'll scan in an 8x10 neg and print off a huge print just to see how it looks. I've never bothered to frame up one of these ... I tend to use conventional prints for the wall.
In the future I expect to continue b&w printing my personel stuff but in the commerical world I'll never go back.
-Rob

[Struan Gray]

I have only ever shot photographs on film. Two years ago my printing was 100% traditional. Now I am 100% digital.

The change came about mostly because I left a job where I had access to fully-equipped but almost unused darkrooms. My background includes image processing and scientific imaging, so once scanners of reasonable quality were available at an affordable price the choice of where to invest my own money was a no-brainer. It helped that a digital darkroom is much more compatible with my three small children.

I now have access again to the same darkrooms, but probably won't use them except perhaps for some film developing, and even that only in ULF.