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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!
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.
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!
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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."
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
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.