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.

Comments

It's a hipster thing

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:It's the darkness...

[fleabay]

How about you and I find a dark room, and see what develops?

Re:It's the darkness...

[monkeyhybrid]

Depends what you intend exposing.

It's an artform

[al0ha]

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!

Re:It's an artform

[Solandri]

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.

Ansel Adams

[westlake]

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"

Re:It's the chemicals..

[relisher]

I find this really offensive. I love to use film because of the imperfection that's so natural, not the chemicals. Not all high schoolers are druggies

The actual appeal

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:The actual appeal

[Zeek40]

People who describe themselves as audiophiles tend to be the kind of people who think that spending > $1000 for a speaker wire will improve the quality of their sound. They're really not worth paying attention to.

Re:The actual appeal

[Camembert]

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.

Re:It's the chemicals..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the chemicals have affected your joke detection.

Re:It's the chemicals..

[flyneye]

Its natural because the students are using the darkroom to smoke pot and screw. Film? Yeah, whatever...

The Audio Scoop

[fyngyrz]

The thing about analog sound devices have always been that they sound warm and pleasant under most settings.

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