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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.
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.
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"
I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.
It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.
Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.
Not everyone is crazy like that. Many want simply to get a realistic sound reproduction, something you can quite plainly not get from all the little plastic multimedia boxes or bose all in one system.
It must be said that a good quality vinyl record played on good equipment can sound nicely musical. Sometimes better than the cd, but this is often because there is usually less "loudness war" (overcompression) on vinyl compared to many popular music cd masterings.
This was the case with one of the last 5 Bob Dylan albums (I can't remember which one), everyone could hear on the same system that the rare vinyl edition did sound noticeably more musical, and the fault was purely in the compression used in the CD mastering process.