Shutterfinger

A Visit to YO Darkroom

Despite the unassuming exterior, there's a fine darkroom and a lot of great people behind these doors.

Who in their right mind would open a rental darkroom in today's digital age? No one shoots film anymore right? As for film and paper processing, that's for beard-wearing geezers with developer-stained fingers. These guys already have a darkroom at home, along with every book Ansel Adams ever wrote.

Apparently, a team of entrepreneurs in Philadelphia apparently didn't get the memo. They opened YO Darkroom (short for "Your Own Darkroom") a little over a year ago. Aside from renting time in their well-equipped photo lab, they also run a gallery, sponsor classes and hold events.

It helps that they're located in the heart of Philadelphia, a dense urban area that's easy to navigate by foot or bike, with good public transportation and packed with college students and young professionals. Their prices are reasonable and class topics range from photograms to screen printing.

The secret to their success, however, is community. Photographers and other artsy types like having a place where they can hang out and associate with like-minded folks. It's especially appealing to a guy like me, who lives in the 'burbs, works from home, and doesn't get out as much as he'd like.

I'm mentioning all this because there may be something akin to a YO Darkroom in your own city, town or neighborhood. If so, why not pay it a visit? They could use your support. If not, maybe someone like you could open one. Virtual communities are flourishing; why not real ones?

Low-Hassle B&W Film Processing

Here is an example of what a correctly exposed and developed negative should look like. There's is detail in the shadows and highlights and neither area is too thin or too dense.

There are a lot of photographers who have a deep and abiding love for the esoterica of film processing. If you're such a photographer then pay no attention to what I'm about to say. It's not written for you. This is for the folks who shoot black and white film only on occasion and who want or need to do their own processing, scan the resulting negatives, and print them digitally.

Since digital printing lets you do a lot more tone tweaking than you could in a chemical darkroom, your goal should be to produce properly exposed, properly developed, spot-free negatives with a full tonal range and that are relatively easy to scan. Here are a few tips on how.

1. If you use roll film, use a film tank you can invert for agitation. Stainless steel or plastic reels work equally well, but if you opt for plastic, make sure they're bone-dry before you attempt to wind film onto them. If they're even slightly damp they will cause the film to seize, which turns an otherwise pleasant procedure into a major pain-in-the-ass.
2. Use fresh chemicals. If you don't develop film often, you'll be much better off mixing small quantities of fresh chemicals (especially developer) to use within a day or two. This way you know they're at full strength and your results will be more consistent and predictable.
3. Avoid over-development. It emphasizes film grain, increases highlight density, and makes the film harder to scan. As long as you don't exceed the recommended development time and temperature and agitate gently, you should be in the ballpark.
4. Keep it clean, from start to finish. Anything floating in your chemicals, rinse water, or the air will find its way onto the surface of your negatives, where it will show up as dust spots. The more pristine your negatives, the less time you'll have to spend spotting them. Even if you're scanning negs or slides you shot years ago, taking a few seconds to clean them before scanning can save many minutes of spotting later.

In a nutshell, the more you do to eliminate or minimize the defects that will cause problems and cost time when you scan and print, the more you'll enjoy shooting with film.

Scan versus Scan

One of your options when you have film developed at a retail mini-lab is to have it scanned and burned to a CD. This is undeniably convenient, especially if you don't have a scanner of your own. The quality of the scans is often better than you might think, but a lot depends on who's doing them.

How can you tell if a scan is of reasonably good quality? Aside from the quality of any accompanying prints, take a close look at the scans on your monitor to make sure there are no film scratches, dust, or excessive grain. If you've got an image browser or pixel editing program with a histogram feature, use it to see whether there's clipping in the highlights or shadows.

In general,  the less tweaking you have to do, the better the scan. This is important because mini-lab scans are almost always in JPEG format, so any edits and re-saves you do will erode the image data.

In case you're wondering just how good a mini-lab scan can be, here are two samples. One was done was done at a local camera shop, the other on my Nikon Coolscan V film scanner. Can you tell which is which?

Scan A

Scan B

Is This Progress?

It amazes me what some paper distributors are charging for "fine art" ink jet papers. Harman Gloss FB, for example, sells for around $28.00 for 15 sheets of 8.5 x 11" paper. This works out to about $1.87 per sheet. In contrast, 25 sheets of 8 x 10" Ilford Multigrade IV Fiber-based can be had for $24.00, which works out to $0.96 per sheet. The reason I compared these two brands is because a print on Harmon Gloss FB is supposed to look the most like a print on an air-dried silver-based glossy paper like Multigrade IV FB. From all accounts, Harmon Gloss FB is a wonderful paper, but why should it cost almost twice as much per sheet as one that's actually coated with silver? Keep in mind that your actual cost per print is even higher once you add the price of ink. Silver-based images are created with light, which is free. Ink jet inks can have an effective price of almost $7000 per gallon! And you thought gasoline was expensive...

Six Reasons Why Film Is Still a Viable Option

Even though I have a digital SLR and am very comfortable with using Photoshop to adjust and print my photos, I don't plan on selling my stash of film cameras any time soon. In fact, I might add to it. Here are six reasons why:

1. Excellent cameras are available dirt-cheap. Lightly used, top-of-the-line film cameras are selling on e-Bay for only a few hundred dollars. Even the creme-de-la-creme, such as Leicas and Hasselblads, sell for less than a Nikon D300 body.
2. Used film equipment has already depreciated so much in value it won't drop much further. This means that you can buy a film body a very reasonable price and still sell it a few years later for close to what you paid for it. You can't say that for DSLR bodies. The feature-packed DSLR you buy today can lose half its resale value the day its replacement is announced.
3. You've got more choices. Lower cost of entry makes it more attractive to try a different camera system or a different format entirely.
4. Excellent films are still available. Although film is harder to find in drug stores and small camera shops, if you buy from specialty retailers you can get excellent films that scan better than ever better, all at a cost of just a few dollars per roll.
5. Excellent, inexpensive flatbed scanners are widely available. There's less need for a chemical darkroom or increasingly scarce pro labs when you can buy an excellent flatbed transparency scanner for $500 or less. Today's transparency scanners can handle every film size from 35mm to 8x10" with ease.
6. Film is a reliable back-up medium. If you do nothing else but store your negatives and transparencies in a cool, dry, dark place, they're likely to last a lot longer than you ever will. You can't say that for magnetic or optical media. Even if the media remain intact, there are no guarantees that the supporting software and hardware will still be around.

One major "catch" to all this is that good, reliable film processing is increasingly harder to find, especially for anything larger than 35mm. You may have to resort to (gulp!) processing it yourself. If anyone's sufficiently interested, I'd be happy to share some tips on how to do it with minimum muss and fuss.