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Even In Digital Photography Age, High Schoolers Still Flock To the Darkroom
v3rgEz writes: In the age of camera-equipped smart phones and inexpensive digital cameras, many high schoolers have never seen a roll of film or used an analog camera — much less developed film and paper prints in a darkroom. Among those that have, however, old school development has developed a serious cult following, with a number of high schools still finding a dedicated audience for the dark(room) arts.
Students still like to huff them. Really, can you blame them? A small, dark, and enclosed space is perfect for this!
I can see the appeal.
Guess what teenagers like to do in the dark, away from the teacher's supervision?
My local bookstore has cut back heavily on its offering of books, since apparently it can't make much money off of them in a post-literary age when what books are read can be bought for cheaper online. To fill the void, it has expanded its choice of what I can only describe as hipster accoutrement, such as ECM on vinyl, Moleskine notebooks, and fancy tea sets.
But the most surprising item was Lomo cameras: these are selling like hotcakes, in spite of the fact that they use old-fashioned film. I would have imagined no one wanted to deal with the expense of giving film to a photo lab (I live in an Eastern European country where this costs serious money) or the hassle of developing it themselves, but when marketed as a trendy thing, some people are ready to turn back from digital.
Digital photography should be seen as a compliment, not a replacement, toward analog photography.
I think the same can be said for digital music and vinyl records, if you know that whole argument.
I think the same can be said for ebooks, where a physical book is always nice as it has features, like flipping and feel, that an ebook doesn't. But when it comes to digital books, it's great being able to do word finds.
Can anyone name anything else?
Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
Consider how iphones put date/location info on pictures. They could also be doing it in a secret way. The only way to be sure your camera isn't "telling on you" by secretly tagging/watermarking your photo with personally identifiable information is to start with a filmy and process it yourself. Therefore, the darkroom is actually a way of maintaining privacy... who knew...? :-)
Paranoid much? Outside of smartphones, digital cameras don't usually have GPS functionality: that is a feature one has to shop around for. And the JPG files produced by a camera, even one with a GPS feature, are not exactly obfuscated labyrinths of DRM: you can easily view and edit the EXIF and XMP metadata, and if you want to really be sure of what's in the file, the binary format is quite straightforward.
Consider how iphones put date/location info on pictures. They could also be doing it in a secret way. The only way to be sure your camera isn't "telling on you" by secretly tagging/watermarking your photo with personally identifiable information is to start with a filmy and process it yourself. Therefore, the darkroom is actually a way of maintaining privacy... who knew...? :-)
Or you could just take the pictures your digital camera gives you and rip out the meta data.
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.
I began a career in photography in the 80s and as such I can definitely understand the kid's appeal to traditional photographic methodology, it is a true art form where skill and knowledge must be developed over time in order to achieve spectacular results. It is very gratifying to manipulate both film and chemistry in order to achieve the image you have imagined, and watch it unfold slowly in real time on paper as you swirl the chemistry over it. Good times for all, keep it up kids!
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Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
Allow me to introduce you to one of the great masters of the darkroom and analog photography:
Ansel Adams, "The Tetons - Snake River"
My girlfriend in high school and I would frequently go into the dark room -- but you really didn't have much time, as the teacher knew how much time things should take, and would wonder why we were going in there if it wasn't to develop something. (we had a print shop, and one of the darkrooms had a vertical process camera, so we were in there quite often; the photography darkroom not so much)
If you over developed things, he'd know you weren't watching things closely. So you could sneak a minute or two of snogging in, but that's about it.
We had darkrooms where the door revolveds, so there wasn't any way to let light from the outside into the darkroom. You learned to keep the door towards the inside, so you had a couple seconds of warning.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.
He probably is a tinfoil hat conspiracy loon, however, there is a grain of truth to what he is saying. Digital camera sensors can have a unique fingerprint. Dead pixels, model specific JPG quantization tables, sensor size, all these things can help a digital forensic analyst match a camera to the photos it's taken. The same is harder to prove with an analog camera.
John
It's comparable to the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. The only worthy attraction is in the sheer retro-ness of it. It certainly isn't in the quality; a good DLSR today is an amazing tool, capable of far more than yesterdays SLRs in every area but outright spectral retargeting (IE, you can put IR film in an SLR and go -- an IR sensor of equal quality, not so much), and that includes in ultimate image quality in normal regimes. Even as far as developing goes, modern software has made the range of actions and remediation one can pull off in the darkroom look like a tiny collection of beginner's moves.
I do not regret, not even one little bit, no longer having to do the tray-and-line dance with my work. Furthermore, I shoot more, and better, with my DSLR than I could ever have hoped to accomplish with any SLR I ever owned.
Up until the current generation of DSLRs, I always felt that I wasn't *quite* there. But today, I literally have no reason to look back. I have to hand it to Canon, Nikon, etc... they've done a great job. Between the quality obtainable, the ability to go out and shoot a thousand *good* images without changing "film", the incredible range of usable ISO (sensitivity to light), in-camera preview -- and disposal -- so you actually know what you have while you're still on-site and able to try again, to readily available histograms and after-the-fact white balance... and then "developing" with Aperture or Lightroom... I'll take a DSLR every time.
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auto/geek/sports trifecta. yes, someone still uses a bow and arrow. yes, someone still uses a slide rule. and, i still use an actual paper map. knowledge of the Old Ways, grasshopper.
There could be a tiny GPS chip in your film camera, projecting the location on the film in a very subtle way...
You'll need to put on a tinfoil hat to see it though, the chemtrails distort your vision otherwise so you can't see it.
...and film and development costs eventually change that triple dollar sign to tens of them. Or more. While the DSLR can hold at four. Not to mention running out of film when you're not done shooting, not knowing the quality of the shots you've taken, not being able to have a 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th and...) chance, being limited to a fixed sensitivity, and the immediate and unavoidable aging process that starts the moment a print is finished.
No thanks. Been there, done that, it totally sucked. It's just a retro urge, hipster nonsense in terms of any functional issue you can name. If it's fun for you, by all means, go for it, but don't ever kid yourself you're doing something worthwhile on the quality front. What you're actually doing is crippling yourself intentionally, both on the front end, when you shoot, and the back end, when you develop.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's the problem with conspiracy theorists. They always have just enough truthiness to them to make people pay attention. Stop feeding the trolls!
Our limited education tax dollars have no business funding something so useless to modern society as darkroom photography.
It's retro. Retro is big right now.
Daughter graduated from high school two years ago. She took darkroom, created pinhole cameras, and later got a Holga. It's called Lomography, and it's become quite popular. Just recently she acquired a very old twin lens reflex and is experimenting with that.
One of the advantages is that old school cameras use 120 and 220 film, a format that's still being propped up by the wedding photography industry. So film and developing are readily available, at least for now.
One issue is that old passive handheld light meters degrade over time, and new handheld meters are kinda expensive. You almost need a modern camera to take light readings in order to accurately set up the retro camera.
I see this as the photography equivalent of the resurgence of LP records.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
i worked in custom color and B&W darkrooms for over 10 years
finally by the late 90's there were 3 jobs for over 200 techs in the SE Michigan area
The oldest piece of hardware was a Kodak K10 that still had vacuum tubes
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Throwing an exposed piece of apparently blank photo paper into a clear liquid bath and having a picture appear some 20 or so seconds later is about as close to true magic as you're likely to get. Its quite a thrill the first time you see it.
I can tell you the meaning of life,
but you have to promise not to laugh.
like seeing that print appear before your very eyes in a tray of developer.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
and if you want to really be sure of what's in the file, the binary format is quite straightforward.
Unless that's just the primary copy, and there's a "hidden" copy watermarked across the entire image with lossy error correction, so that the data can be recovered by 3-letter agencies, even after you crop the image.
start with a filmy and process it yourself. Therefore, the darkroom is actually a way of maintaining privacy
How can you be sure the lens on your analog camera doesn't have "micro defects" designed to implant a unique fingerprint on the image, which can then be used to identify the serial number of the camera, and.... therefore.... who owns it?
Unfortunately in this new day and age, worrying about your privacy is a very real concern.
I used to pass off the "gubmint is watching and listening to everything you do" crowd as paranoid crazy tinfoil-hatters who thought the 'gubmint' was going to extraordinary efforts to illegally spy on its citizens digital communications.
Then Snowden happened and blew the lid wide open, clearly showing that the can of worms was empty, and the worms are *everywhere*.
There have been a lot of posts talking about the negatives of the dark room. In light of my own photography instructor passing away this week, I feel obligated to talk about the benefits. Here's what I learned:
A physical photography class is a lesson in both physics and chemistry. It's not as in depth as a physics class or a straight chemistry class, but a basic understanding of lenses and chemical processes used to take and develop film offer up applicability for both of those classes, which is often beneficial for students. In the same way, you could digitize physics and chemistry, but nothing takes the place of a good physical experiment.
Physical photography does not allow you to take five hundred shots and hope for a good one. This is great for beginning students, as it forces them to think about each shot that they take. This gets them into the habit of composing shots to show exactly what is intended, as opposed to lucking into a good picture.
A physical photo does not allow you to put on digital filters. Any modification of the picture must come from an understanding of the tools used to modify the photo. Understanding how to dodge and burn a photo in real life will help when moving to digital.
There is a nostalgic element to developing film, but what film provides is a solid, tangible object. You can print digital photos, but unless you're using photo paper, the tactile nature is different. Also, the digital shot is limited by the printer. This isn't as much of an issue these days, but it's something to be aware of.
My photography instructor admittedly shot nothing but digital in his own work. You're right, there are too many benefits in the professional world. But there are benefits to learning the old tools as well.
We had polaroid and competing instant photo's back in the seventies and eighties as well. Those were used by professional photographers to check if what they envisioned was what was going to happen on print/film and not just by people taking snapshots.
The screen on the back of your camera will tell you something about your picture, but in no way will it tell you if you've made a successful photograph without already knowing what to look for and how to achieve it first. It can help you quickly adjust your exposure settings, if you zoom in you can see if you have your focus sorted out and if you have motion blur. You can watch the edges of your image to see if you've framed your shot properly and the tiny image will give you clues about your composition.
You have to know all this stuff already in order to be able to judge the picture you just took and it will take you probably about a minute to do so. During that minute, you have no time to take additional shots, while often "the good stuff" is happening right in front of you.
I have many images taken during many shoots that looked "great" on the back of the camera, but once I got back home and looked at them at a larger screen and started processing them, turned out to need a lot of work and often were mediocre at best. There are some things that a digital camera will give you instant feedback on, but having to be way more convinced about your shot because it will cost you one of your precious 36 exposures will make you take better shots just as much, albeit based on different presumptions and criteria. In the end, having to wait for the final results before you can make your ultimate judgment on your picture applies to both.
If anything, digital allows you to take more shots for the same money spent on equipment and materials and the tooling gives you much more ways to repair or improve the initial image captured. With film, you can develop the film only once and then you'll have to figure out the correct sequence and timing for how you will be exposing your print. This means that you have an extra "point of no return" in developing the film and physical limitations in what you can do exposing your print. In practice, that means that if shot digitally in RAW, you can get away with messing up your exposure a whole lot more and in post processing, you can "develop your film" differently for different parts of your image. Once you're there, you can do the same for the development of your "print", not being limited by the amount of time and how much you can burn and dodge areas of your image.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What can be seen as a weak point can be one of the biggest advantages of analog photography with basic manual exposure cameras: it costs money and it takes time. Meaning, you learn to think more about the shot before taking it.
I noticed this in my own photography:
- I often photographed with a Rolleiflex up to the year 2000 or so; I had approx 3 pictures on a roll of 12 that I found really worth enlarging
. - With an AF 35mm SLR back then I made 3 really good pictures on a roll of 36.
- In digital I have 3 really good pictures on 300 or so.
Currently I am using film again next to digital. The Horizon 202 panoramic camera is a superb tool for fascinating pictures, I bring it on every holiday. I also found a very cheap good condition Nikon F3, which was one of the very best manual focus SLRs ever made. It is a joy to put simply a fixed 35mm lens on it, load a black and white film and walk around.
bR Regarding printing, it is lovely to see the image appear in a tray but largely I replaced that with scanning and Photoshop. However, it is truly fascinating and worthwhile to learn ancient print techniques such as gum bichromate. Once mastered the results can be incredible, much more poetic than any Photoshop filter you throw at a picture. Unfortunately I don't get around doing that kind of art form these days, it is a slow process, I simply don't have enough personal hobby time anymore. But for those that can spare the time it is a fantastic investment of effort.
As a kid I got some really good results with a 1950s non-SLR camera that didn't even have a light meter (but it did have multiple lenses). The dynamic range of a lot of films lets you get away with exposure choices that would ruin a shot with that Canon.
Sometimes that entry cost can suck more than the ongoing cost. People using film may typically take less shots per session as well so the throughput may not be high. I know that I don't take as many digital shots as I should because I'm still in the film mindset and seem to think a lot about whether a shot is worth it instead of spamming the memory card. Some thought and lots of shots is an ideal, but either way you get different results from the two mediums. Noise especially sucks in low light digital while the large grain size in high ISO film is a less annoying compromise.
Conversely I've got an old lens (pentax 50mm) that some people can identify immediately just by looking at out of focus portions of any photos I take with it. (Other people's photos with that lens here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/...)
I'm sure there's other lenses that produce identifiable artifacts.
As an amateur who has kept the analog way for long, now a happy digital shooter with little interest in the lab alchemy, I understand people still attracted to "old school" photography. In the club I attend, there are a few young adults who regularly sign up for the darkrooms. A student I talked with told me that, even with his limited budget, he was happy to afford second-hand medium format analog cameras -- and other once-pricey toys now discarded by pros. Also, because of the scarcity of film and chemicals, he felt compelled to carefully think out his setup or composition before shooting, which made him quickly progress. In this case, old school may be a good school.
At least for me it was a place to hide under the sinks/tables and molest girls. Also other things.
I respect the "It's retro, stupid!" arguments, but I can't help but wonder if in this digital age of constant messaging (both via sms, but also via advertisements and a bombardment of information) the darkroom offers these students quiet concentration away from all the distractions. Surely taking out your illuminated phone in a darkroom is a "no-no", so maybe it's an excuse for them to disconnect, without having to tell their friends "I'm disconnecting," but rather "I'll be in the darkroom for awhile" (translated: "I b in dkrm"). I know I've started brewing beer, and I find that while a lot of it is mindless labour, it is an escape from all the digital activities I've been doing for so many years.
Good for them! I think this is a good approach to learning all the great photography concepts like composition, lighting, and exposure. Because you have limited shots on a roll (and presumably a limited student budget) it's going to force you to slow down and think about what you're doing rather than blindly and mindlessly shooting. Once they have a foundation, then it can easily be translated into digital, and make them more thoughtful photographers.
I see a lot of nostalgia from the people commenting on this poll who have actually spent time in a darkroom. I was lucky enough to go to a school with a darkroom in the 90s and have noting but fond memories of it. Most photos ended up over or under exposed or out of focus. Doesn't matter. It's like reminiscing about how we felt about our first Commodore 64 or BBC Micro or whatever we had. It was slow, the graphics and sound were bad, and we would never use it for serious work now, but we all fonly recall the countless hours of enjoyment we had.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.
He probably is a tinfoil hat conspiracy loon, however, there is a grain of truth to what he is saying. Digital camera sensors can have a unique fingerprint. Dead pixels, model specific JPG quantization tables, sensor size, all these things can help a digital forensic analyst match a camera to the photos it's taken. The same is harder to prove with an analog camera.
The be able to do anything with that sort of information you'd need to know it was there and know how to find it, and it would have to be resilient to compression, cropping, resizing, all sorts of filters, converting from RAW to JPEG, etc. etc., and still not be visible to the end user.
never heard of a roll of film before. I think movies use reels of digital tape. I never seen an analog camera before except for the ones in the museums and old movies. Thanks for posting the link to the article.
Nonsense. When run in their linear range, which is to say, where they are designed to normally run, analog devices, be they tubes, fets or bipolar transistors, all follow the input signal faithfully, plus or minus inherent noise -- no "warmth" or other characteristics are inherent. *NONE*. Digital also.
However, when a tube is pushed into its nonlinear range, the gain transfer curve bends over comparatively smoothly so that what would be a clipped signal in a device like a bipolar transistor, turns first into a compressed signal, and even later down the curve, begins to evidence distortion that resembles clipping, but has, because of that still-somewhat-gentle curve, an entirely different set of dominant harmonics as compared to, for instance, a bipolar transistor at or near saturation.
That characteristic is why (knowledgable) musicians who use distortion as a tonal tool typically prefer tubes; specifically because they *do* run the tubes out of the linear area of the transfer curve, and the result is interesting and often pleasing. When the distortion is the result of a transfer curve that abruptly goes from highly linear to highly nonlinear, as is the case with bipolar devices, the result is most unpleasant.
However, this choice does not *ever* hold true for a musical reproduction system based on tubes that isn't running in a range that will distort the music. You'd have to turn it up so far that one or more elements of the preamp or power amp is pushed past the linear part of its transfer curve, and then *everything* distorts -- and that's not a "warm" sound, that's a "hey, your system is sucking, turn that thing down" sound.
So, for example, if I get out my Les Paul or my Strat and plug it into a tube amp, I'm doing so because the amp's distortion is going to very significantly color the reproduction of what I play. I'm going to adjust the amp specifically so I *get* distortion. It'll sound fabulous. I'll get feedback, there will be awesome weirdnesses when I hit harmonics on my strings, pick and fretting artifacts will sound very different, etc. When I record this as accurately as possible, however, and subsequently play it back on a musical reproduction system of ANY kind, I am NOT going to adjust that system so that it distorts, because I don't want MORE distortion, I want exactly, and I mean *exactly*, what I recorded. All the more so when it's my guitar plus drums, bass and vocals. Etc. Adjusting a music reproduction system doing that task so that it distorts is the act of a madman or a masochist. Tube, transistor or digital whatever completely aside, the entire objective of an audio system is to get the music to your ears without changing it in any way that degrades the transfer. So the kind of distortion the playback system would evidence if overdriven is (had better be!) utterly irrelevant.
The fact is, a digital system, an analog bipolar system in class A or properly biased AB, and a tube system in class A or a nominal push-pull configuration with an output transformer all reproduce essentially the same signal in human perception terms, plus or minus noise. But noise is a significant factor with tube designs. Sidle up to your tweeter and listen. Hear that hiss? That's coming from the tubes themselves. Now do the same with a 24- or 32-bit prepro and an amp with a 110db noise floor, like a Marantz MA700. Viola! No audible noise at the tweeter. It's there, but it's so blinking minuscule, you can't perceive it. Entirely a good thing.
So the whole "audiophile" trip about tube amps being "better" is a complete confusion of something they do for musicians playing a specific instrument (ex guitar, horn, bass), which they do not usefully do for general sound reproduction, because, and hear me on this, music consisting of more than one instru
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He said one thousand dollar speaker wire , lol.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.
Given the existence of undocumented- and more seriously, undisclosed- yellow marks output by various laser printers which have in at least one case been proven to be steganographic markings *and* decoded, it's certainly not "moronic" to consider that a similar scheme could in theory exist hidden in some digital cameras.
Frankly, in the wake of the Snowden revelations I wouldn't even consider this possibility ludicrously paranoid any more. Of course, digital cameras can have giveaway signatures like naturally-occurring hot pixels (and other signs) anyway, so in a sense it's already there. I don't think it's plausible that a non-GPS-advertised device would have a hidden detector inside, or even any method (e.g. WiFi triangulation) of detecting its location if that wasn't already designed into it.
A camera on a GPS-enabled smartphone though? If my life depended on it, I wouldn't bet against the possibility.
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Corrosion? On a camera? Fungus on lenses yes - corrosion no. Long established designs having trouble instead of a recent model designed from scratch? It appears that you are just trying to find something so you can try to prove one of your "foes" wrong and if you can't think of any real examples that's somehow still OK. You had a real point in there somewhere - how about just sticking to that instead of some sort of pathetic game of trying to show up the "foe"?
Seriously?
Give up on your petty attempt to troll a "foe" - as if you've ever seen anyone, let alone a lot of people trying and failing to use mistreated cameras instead of the norm that is stored out of the wet.
To point out how I know your bluff in your pointless oneupmanship is worthless and that you can't put one over on me with it. Who tries to sell or give away a badly stored and corroded camera? You find such things in landfill and not in use.
You are the one that jumped on my comment remember. Oh that's right, you want me to stop writing so you can claim some sort of "win" in a troll game.
Also your argument about old film cameras being crap rests on photos of a broken digital camera. Why do you even bother? Please post seriously instead of a silly game of trolling people you have marked as foe. I don't think we should have to put up with such bullshit.