Why Scan LF B&W Negatives?

[John_4185]

Don Wallace This has been a very informative thread. It seems that most are going digital. Is there anyone else like me, who is taking b&w BACKWARD in time? I hope to be able to dispense with an enlarger eventually and shoot only 5x7 and 8x10 for contact printing, [...]

Yes, I would like to do that in 8x10 or larger, however as a concession to modernisim (of the twenties?) I would like to have a multi-bulb contact printer - you know the type in which one can switch on/off any of dozens of bulbs to control local exposure. Forgive me for that nonpurist thing.

So that raises the question - has anyone made one? The used printers I've seen use hard-to-find bulbs and are generally a wreck.

(FWIW, several years ago when IBM had a laptop with a transparent screen that could be removed and placed on a transparency projector, I made a half-hearted attempt to use it as a contact-printing masking device. The confluence of tech and wet met head-on and I gave it up. Seemed silly.)

[David A. Goldfarb]

I just took an albumen workshop, so I'm certainly going backward. I scan B&W negs so that I can put some of my work on the Web, but I have no interest in printing B&W digitally. The prints are just unattractive in comparison to traditional prints.

I like LightJet and Chromira for color, so I send out work for that purpose occasionally, but I don't own any printer for photographs.

[Oren Grad]

I own neither photo/film scanner nor inkjet printer. My interest these days is mostly in contact prints on ordinary silver paper from negatives made in odd formats with really old cameras. I've been putting some effort recently into educating myself about monochrome inkjet prints by seeking out and studying prints representing a range of photographers and printer/ink/paper combinations, but so far I've not seen anything that has any appeal to me - if anything, what I've seen so far has just strengthened my interest in traditional silver prints.

[RDKirk]

I have loved working in the quiet, cool solitude of the darkroom--so much so that my first marriage crashed because of it. Older and wiser, I can Photoshop in the same computer room as my daughter and second wife, and frequently we have important discussions while we work.

I did price the possibility of a wet darkroom when we bought our house a few years ago. Adding plumbed space to a 10x10 darkroom--a single-use space--would have added $40,000 to the cost of the house in our area. So when comparing the cost of the "digital darkroom" to a wet darkroom, I start with $40,000 and add the equipment (which has no other use) to that...I thus estimated the total cost of a wet darkroom with professional capabilities at over $55,000. Our computer room, of course, gets a lot more use than just my scanning and Photoshopping (and I do the wet processing of my 4x5 negatives in the laundry room, another dual-use facility).

Even then, a wet darkroom I could have built in my home would still not have been capable of producing quality 40x50-inch prints. I would still have had to go to a professional lab for that, as I do now.

Paul Butzi has made a point on his website that bears repeating. His point, as I understand it, is that silver printing has a beauty of its own, but the beauty of a silver print does not obviate the innate beauty that a good inkjet print has on its own. More, any person is perfectly free to prefer one or the other, or to enjoy both in its own way.

"But we don't have to. Inkjet printing lets us make prints that look like platinum prints, or cyanotypes, or Van Dyke prints - and do it easily. We're free to explore new surface textures, including the lovely smooth finish of hot press watercolor paper. We're free to choose papers without optical brighteners, papers which are acid free, papers that feel differently in your hand and have different looks. Sure, those things were possible with silver printing, but when we smeared gelatin silver emulsion on canvas, or watercolor paper, we lost the strengths of silver printing, and kept the weaknesses. That's not the case with inkjet printing."

http://www.butzi.net/articles/silverstandard.htm

There are beautiful women of every skin color, hair color, and eye color, and each is beautiful in her own right BECAUSE of it, not in spite of it. Sophia Loren would not look so beautiful dyed blonde with blue contact lenses. The man who sees beauty in women of only one skin color, one eye color, or one hair color is the poorer and unhappier man for it. For the rest, "the world is full of beautiful women."