nope ( my darkroom work has been affected by seeing great darkroom prints from the beginning, but digital negatives and capturing things with a scanner / camera has changed everything )
nope ( my darkroom work has been affected by seeing great darkroom prints from the beginning, but digital negatives and capturing things with a scanner / camera has changed everything )
Last edited by jnantz; 29-Feb-2024 at 07:17.
No.
So you are not sure whether your "targets" for your prints have changed due to your exposure to the huge number of Photoshopped images?Originally Posted by xkaes
Now we're getting somewhere.
So the negative is reality, but the print isn't. I guess that makes a paper negative a photographic hermaphrodite.
7 dollars a roll versus 40$ for the 5 pack of that 200 gold 120 format is not exactly a nice thing to deal with. Particularly as most people are paying damn near 30$ a roll for DEVELOPING it..
From the beginning photography has been very expensive. Why should now be any different? It’s really not much more expensive than 30 years ago if you calculate for inflation. You can cut your costs considerably if you make your own photo paper and film. Denise Ross’ site ( the light farm ) details this process (even color ) . The bw emulsion I use uses 4 ingredients and takes about 20 minutes to make (others have a few more ingredients and are just as easy to make) and costs pennys, blue images (iron) even less. There’s more to photography than factory made everything. the developing it part is mainly because there are only a few labs left. where I live there is only 1 commercial lab left in the whole state.
Last edited by jnantz; 29-Feb-2024 at 07:07.
I still have a serious analoque darkroom but to the question Has Digital Changed Darkroom Printing? YES and for me and my apprentice it is a game changer , I am super stoked about the possibilities digital has opened up for us in our darkroom.
what was in front of the camera or put on the photo paper as a photogram or whatever is "reality" - light makes an impression on the light sensitive medium. that is the only part of the process that mirrors "reality" --- the undeveloped latent image because it hasn't been enhanced/converted/interpreted into something else through a chemical process, or human intervention .. the developed negative/daguerreotype/tintype/chrome/photographic print/digital file is fabricated. ... most of photography is fake.
I don't love the word fake. I used to tell my students that the (properly exposed) latent image was the capture of the reality at that moment. From that point forward, it was an interpretation and expression of the scene. Even 20+ years ago when the first digital cameras were around (640x480) I had students using those images in combination with their photography. It wasn't my thing and I simply addressed it as mixed media work. I gave them credit for committing to a concept. My issue with much of what I see now is that it is simply a digital capture shoved through a few photoshop filters and published. I saw a local show recently where the artist (photographer) had spent piles of money printing photos of wildlife and a few landscapes and not a single one was framed well or composed with any forethought. Color balance was way off as well. He was charging $500-$1000 for 11x14 - 16x20 images. None were sold but visitors all said they liked them. The most common thing I heard was "it's so colorful". Can you imagine what our world would be like if the number of images produced were done on film cameras? Photography or the documentation of our daily lives is more popular than ever and maybe a few .... just a few... will venture to a darkroom.
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