100 % real photography. To keep in touch with my Luddite roots I'm starting to do Pt/Pd.
100 % real photography. To keep in touch with my Luddite roots I'm starting to do Pt/Pd.
I'm 90% wet darkroom and 10% digital. The digital is almost all for the web, except a little bit of printing on the Epson R800 I recently acquired and has come in handy to send image samples to interested parties.
Two years ago it was about the same. I think I got my scanner about 2-3 years ago (it's an Epson 2450, bought shortly after it was introduced).
I'm pretty much a B&W guy, since that seems to correlate strongly.
90%: I shoot furniture for a living. Since there is no subject movement, I prefer hot lights and EPY. Digital cannot come close to this combination in our opinion. Film is scanned for high-end brochure reproduction.
10%: For my personal work I shoot and print traditional --Tmax and color neg. I still very much enjoy the challenge of my wet darkroom.
I'm not commercial but I'd say it's about 5% traditional darkroom, 95% digital from 4x5 scanned film. The only reason it isn't 100% digital is I develop my negatives in the darkroom plus I've found that I can make contact sheets for a large number of negatives faster the old fashiioned way. So about once every couple months I grit my teeth and go back in the fume room to make contact sheets from the previous several months' work.
Brian Ellis
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
a mile away and you'll have their shoes.
For both commercial (portraits) and personal work, 100% film capture and 100% traditional printing. But doing more and more digitally enlarged negatives, which will continue, and in which I see great value. I want to do mostly Pt portraits as commercial work in future, and 4x5 film capture makes sense...detail vs. cost. Photoshop gives me great retouching ability, and an enlarged negative that still looks like a genuine Pt/Pd print, if I don't enlarge too much. Without digital in the middle, no easy retouching and no flexibility on print size. OTOH, direct Pt/Pd or silver (Azo) prints from a large in-camera neg is easy! I'm shopping for an 8x20 or 7x17 camera for non-portrait work.
100% traditional B&W here. I don't do color, only for portaits and usually a smaller format. Lugging a 4x5 around can be quite cumbersome and I always have ideas running through my head about a smaller camera, but the payoff in the darkroom is ALWAYS worth it.
Adios Digital except for snapshots.
Digital... born to fade. Try sneezing on an inkjet print - or better yet, leave one in the window for a few weeks !
No more goofing around with scanners, software, drivers, toner, storage devices, profiling, calibrating, etc etc.
Gone to contact printing on Pt/Pd.
I do primarily wet darkroom for personal work, all wet darkroom for my business Labwork - The Black & White Lab www.labwork-bw.com. I do have a digicam for posting things on forums and to photograph my band Rare Blend www.rareblend.net. As long as I can get film and paper and chemicals I will do it the traditional way.
For school, hobby and, hopefully, some sales in the future: All 100% wet in my darkroom. But, I carry a Sony DSC-T1 in my pocket constantly (along with a picture phone on my belt) and have taken about 1500 photos on it since last August. Copy from the Sony to the computer daily, clean it up and start over new each morning.
In reference to digital cameras, I really dont understand this digital stuff. Sure maybe convenient for snap shooting but how can anyone justify shooting digital cameras when 35mm film can pick up 20-40MP?? I see so many books, magazines etc, with digital images with blocked highlights, jaggey edges, no resolution, i just want to puke!! For so many years I read magazines article about film and lens resolutions and everyone was trying for exacting images and suddenly it is ok to have this poor jaggey low res images from "big" 4, 6, and even 8 MP cameras. Am I the only one who can see the king has no chlothes?
And before anyone jumps on me for being anti digital cameras, when they come out with a digital camera that can match film (20+ MP, 40MP???) i will jump for it. I recently looked at 8MP pictures from the canon SLR. they were 4x6 prints, all i saw was unsharp images. 11x14 were all full of little squares.
Look at some of the advertisements on View Camera magazine. You can count the pixels on the images of cameras and lenses they have for sale. Very blurry images at best. I would not buy something from an advertiser that cant fgure out how to make a proper image for an audience that expects quality images.
It isn't about digital, it is about choices
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