Ever heard of a magic bullet? It's a mystical potion or piece of hardware that will turn a mediocre photographer into a great one. I am a recovering magic-bul let chaser. As part of my recovery, I am posting my tortured tale out here in p ublic for all to see. I chose the LF forum because I mostly shoot 4x5, but the painful lessons contained herein could be applied to any format. It's a long ra mble, so thanks in advance for your patience.

I'm finally out of the closet, and it feels good. For years, I looked for mirac le cures to save my crummy prints. I tried every film, lens and developer I cou ld get my hands on. I'd read stuff like this: "I just bought a 135mm f5.6 Ektak ron (with the red dial) and I can't believe the difference! I'm throwing away a ll my old negatives and starting over!", or "You must try developing TMQ in D11- MicroGoop. I have, and my prints GLOW IN THE DARK", or "If you're not using fir eflies as your enlarger light source, throw away your camera!". Of course I'd run right out and buy a red-dial Ektakron or ten gallons of glow-in-the-dark dev eloper, and guess what? One more magic bullet, same pictures, less disposable i ncome.

Thesis: There are no magic bullets, no miracle cures. Good prints are the resu lt of many incremental improvements. Furthermore, gross errors in one area can completely mask many such improvements in other areas. To see lots of improveme nt, you have to make lots of changes.

Let's consider film developer. Judging by the volume of traffic I see on the Web , many of us obsess about which one we use. We are convinced that good prints w ill come our way if only we can find the right potion. Pyro seems to come up a lot, so I'll use it as an example. Please, no flames. I'm sure it's fine stuff ; I'm merely illustrating a point.

The resurgence of pyro's popularity owes itself mostly to Gordon Hutchings' book . He makes some specific claims about the properties of pyro negatives, and by the way, his prints never looked better. Recovering bullet-chasers (like myself ) read this and immediately start to drool. Frantic phone calls are made. "Fed Ex overnight is NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Send a courier via a charter flight. I need t he pyro by tomorrow morning! The future of photography is a stake!". We tremb lingly develop our precious negatives, seductively yellow-green and luminous, wh ile dreaming of "Moonrise, Hernandez". Breathlessly we make a print, and??hmmm. Kinda looks like the old prints.

How can this be? Gordon Hutchings uses pyro, and his prints are better than min e. Didn't I follow all the rules? Wasn't I a good consumer? Why am I being pun ished? Where's the disconnect? Here's a guess. Before Mr. Hutchings ever used pyro, he was already a very good photographer and a very good printer. He unde rstands his tools and materials. In the chain of events that starts with the le ns and ends with the finished print, he's eliminated 90% of possible problems. He's 90% efficient.

To a guy who's running at 90% effectiveness, a change in developer is probably g oing to make a difference. Maybe pyro has some special properties that give you an additional 3% potential to play with. A guy who's already got his act toget her will fully realize that potential. The incremental gain won't be masked by other problems.

Now picture someone at the other end of the spectrum. I, um, I mean HE is runni ng at about 40%. His negative carrier is not parallel to the baseboard, so he h as to stop down to f32 for depth of field. Don't worry that you've just lost al l your sharpness to diffraction. And maybe his darkroom is about as dark as the inside of a ping-pong ball. Pesky highlights. The list goes on, and I think y ou get the point.

Pyro cannot save this poor tortured soul. He is condemned to wail and gnash his teeth in the outer darkness. Everyone else's prints leap off the page, and his look like they came from a 1970's Soviet photocopier. Any incremental gain he m ight have realized by changing developers has been consumed by much larger losse s in other areas.

Here's an analogy. Countless sets of golf clubs are sold with the implicit prom ise that they'll make you a better golfer. Legions of frustrated weekenders in plaid pants ante up for the new magnesium WunderWand or golf balls with a propri etary dimple pattern guaranteed to work on the surface of Pluto. Their enthusias m to improve is sincere but misdirected. What they really ought to doing is lea rning how to use the stuff they already own. They will drop an obscene amount o f money on a set of clubs that could (in theory), deliver a golf ball to the hol e with pinpoint accuracy, and yet the perverse sphere still turns a right angle and disappears into the pond. Nice try, but Tiger Woods could beat you with a h ockey stick.

Most of us already have the tools we need to make better prints. We just need t o learn how to use them. This was brought into focus when I attended a darkroom workshop with Howard Bond a few months ago. He didn't tell me anything I hadn' t already heard; he just showed me how to apply it. I didn't see any red-dial E ktakrons or Micro-FlowD23. What I did see was an experienced craftsman, using ma terials not unlike mine. It was liberating to know that I already had everythin g I needed to make much better prints. I just had to learn to realize their max imum potential.

So, where do you find these incremental improvements, these small, non-magic bul lets? I've listed a few suggestions. Optimize these things first, THEN go buy a new lens, or change developers. Aim the obsession where it can do some good.



Do you know how to focus your view camera, how to use movements to optimize the plane of focus? Always using f45 is not the answer.

What ISO is your favorite film? It's probably not what's on the box. Same for development time.

Your enlarger's negative holder, lens board and easel all need to be very, very close to parallel. If you've never checked, they probably aren't.

Do you use fresh, healthy chemistry?

Your enlarger lens has a sharpest aperture. Do you know what it is?

How dark is your darkroom? Turn on the enlarger and look up into the light, and see what your print sees. Any other light sources up there? Reflections? Lig ht leaks?

Does your enlarger vibrate when trucks drive by?

In any process that involves a chemical reaction, are all the variables (tempera ture, time) under tight control?

Do you know how to burn and dodge? Do you have effective tools readily availabl e, tools that make the job easy? The good news is that, unlike everything else in photography, the tools are cheap!

Well, there's a start?.I'm sure there's plenty more. Maybe the forum readers co uld suggest some others.

And by the way, I told a lie earlier. The chain of events doesn't start at the lens. It starts inside your head.

So.....anyone want to buy a red-dial Ektakron? It's in MINT condition, and guar anteed to make your negatives glow in the dark.

Thanks for reading, and good light.