The Wet Darkroom

I still use film and the wet darkroom for B&W. I think that there is a sense of craft and and a deep satisfaction from a fine wet print that I don't get with a digital print.
 
I used to use a local darkroom, but am currently in the process of building one in my ( soon to be finished ) basement. Back when I was in grad school, I managed to convince my parents to let me convert a room in their basement to a darkroom. Once they moved, I had been without one for many a long year.

I prefer printing in the darkroom because I prefer the results. I find a wet print on a quality paper to be far superior to a digital print. I think that it's more difficult to print this way, but the satisfaction of seeing the end result is well worth it to me. I not only like the look, but the feel as well. I liken wet printing to listening to vinyl versus digital - while digital can sound very good, a quality vinyl rig with a decently mastered record will beat a cd hands down every time ( and don't even get me started on compressed digital files ).

If digital ever reaches the point where it gets redundant to use a wet darkroom, then I'll quit. But then again, once that point is reached, why bother with film at all?

And also, I still feel a bit of the old magic when the print first starts to appear in the developer tray...

Jan
 
KenR said:
I still use film and the wet darkroom for B&W. I think that there is a sense of craft and and a deep satisfaction from a fine wet print that I don't get with a digital print.
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I agree 100% with this statement. I know that it may come across as eletist when I say this ( and maybe it is ) but I can remember the time when it took skill to shoot and print a good photograph, and the art of photography was held in high regard ( relatively speaking ). I miss a bit of that. Not the eletism, but the fact that you actually had to learn a craft and practice at it. Nowadays photography seems to be so ubicquitous that the actual craft ( and dare I say art ) has been cheapened to the point where it rarely seems to be seen as a medium of artistic expression.

Sorry about the rant...
 
Making a digital print is like writing a book. You can stop at anytime, you can tweak your image or digital negative to your hearts content. It's safe, it's reversible, it's marvelous, it's flexible, but it also won't give you an adrenaline rush.

Printing in the darkroom is like calligraphy, half-a-second too long or too short here and there, there goes your print. And that means you start all over again. It's frustrating, it's slow, it's inflexible, but it's also exhilarating.

I don't think it's elitist at all to prefer darkroom, just as it's not wrong to prefer digital printers. But it's useful to know why you prefer one over the other.

Thanks for the question, Bill.
 
Personally, I get better B&W results in a darkroom. I use printers for color, and built a 4x5 B&W darkroom in my apartment. I can print up to 16x20" silver prints fairly easily, with 11x14 and 8x10 very easily.

I also do alternative process printing. Some of which is from digital generated negatives.

I no longer shoot much digital (I don't enjoy the camera) or much 35mm... So now it is somewhat faster to work with wet printing. Much faster in terms of seeing the results. My printing lab takes forever, and the black is horrible.

I am sure that you can get decent inks, but apparently you have to own a printer if you want to play that game. I do not have this kind of trouble with color.
 
The one thing I didn't think about when I started this thread was that to get a good digital print from film, you have to have a good scanner. You need a high pixel count, often the ability to take on a 35mm silver negative with a big density range and, in general, a precise, rugged machine. And those don't come cheap. Remember, a good Imacon (Hasselblad) is going to cost you 10 to 20 thousand dollars, and you are going to be constantly told that isn't as good as a drum scanner.

Admittedly, compared to less expensive scanners, the increase in quality is incremental and the increase in price overwhelming. Between the cost of the scanner and the time it takes to master it, for many folks getting a good scan from a small negative may be out of the question. In those situations, silver, especially if you already own a good enlarger like a Durst and some top lenses, may be the answer.

And now, just to produce some cries of outrage, the cheapest path to a good ink jet print starts with a good digital camera. (Sounds of bottles and beer cans being tossed at the message poster.)
 
shadowfox said:
Making a digital print is like writing a book. You can stop at anytime, you can tweak your image or digital negative to your hearts content. It's safe, it's reversible, it's marvelous, it's flexible, but it also won't give you an adrenaline rush.

Printing in the darkroom is like calligraphy, half-a-second too long or too short here and there, there goes your print. And that means you start all over again. It's frustrating, it's slow, it's inflexible, but it's also exhilarating.

I don't think it's elitist at all to prefer darkroom, just as it's not wrong to prefer digital printers. But it's useful to know why you prefer one over the other.

Thanks for the question, Bill.
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Hey Will, that's so clever! Adrenaline...

I hadn't noticed it! The whole thing is an adventure, one that includes expensive time and materials with an uncertain end... As shooting film, it's a tough game... Fear and hope... Mmmmmmm....

Cheers,

Juan
 
I am all digital as far as printing goes. I spent many years in the darkroom honing the craft for myself and printing for others. I studied with Sid Kaplan, printer extraordinaire. Being in the darkroom was alchemy, magical, frustration, happiness, and a good scotch. I think those that believe that digital printing is crap, don't spend the time to hone the print end of the craft. Everything I know about the darkroom can be used in the "lightroom", of course with differences. Being in the "lightroom" is a craft as well. It don't come easy. There are so many fine papers to choose from nowadays, it is possible to duplicate most darkroom printing paper surfaces.

There are aspects of wet printing that I do miss. There are many aspects that I don't. Lightroom or darkroom? I look at it with the same attitude and feeling. Except now I never mistake the scotch for undiluted Dektol!

Sid Kaplan by Howard Christopherson
 
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I really enjoy the hands-on craft of traditional film photography, film developing, and wet printing. No digital prints for me. I sometimes scan a neg or a print to share on the internet, but I find it tedious.
 
I do all my printing in the normal way (read wet printing). Actually never had a digital print made, so I don't have a clear idea about the quality of digital prints. But I wouldn't want someone else to do my printing, without the darkroom, I think, photography would be much less fun.
 
I only recently came back to shooting and processing (b/w) film. I'm trying to learn to scan it well, but just haven't gotten the knack yet. I also don't have a way to get images off the screen and onto paper at home (or even in the country/region where I'm currently living...).

The idea of a wet darkroom--a place where I understand things--is a nice, comforting fantasy, but I move around between different countries every 1-4 years for work, with housing that's unlikely to be able to accommodate a darkroom. So dragging all that crap around just isn't going to cut it. I suppose I should be very happy that there's a digital alternative; I just haven't begun to master it quite yet. Getting to be OK with Lightroom 2, but that's about it.

But I'm also not willing to invest in some elaborate scanning/printing setup until I have mastered it...I have an old Coolscan IV and a new Epson V700...trying some US-based printer services to see how good of an image I can get from my home scans, since that seems more practical than having my own expensive printer setup to maintain and safeguard against the vagaries of travel, third-world electricity, and the myriad ants I see crawling in and out of the keys on my keyboard as I type this...

I'm also eager to see some seriously high-quality inkjet prints when I'm back in the States this summer, just to see what is possible. My old college photo prof warned me that "while inkjet can look really great, it just doesn't have that magical skin..." I'm hoping some of the newer inkjet papers, like Museo Silver Rag, might help with this.


Can anyone recommend some print or web-based literature to clue me in to the basics of hybrid/digital workflows, techniques, and terms? I mean, I really don't viscerally understand what scans/prints of various resolutions should look like, etc.
 
I will always keep my wet darkroom for B & W shot in my Leicas. Digital equals neither the results nor the pleasures of darkroom work. For color prints, Digital is the way to go. For B&W, I'll stick with the silver image.
 
About 36 years ago my three-year old daughter was sitting in the darkroom with me, at the end of the wet bench, watching her face appear on paper in a tray.
She said: "Daddy -- what makes the picture come?"
I said: "Magic."
And she said: "Oh, Daddy -- I can SMELL the magic!"

Dilute acetic acid will always be a magic aroma to me.
 
I dont have a wet room at home. I set one up not too long ago, but ended up scrapping the project because I felt that using the darkroom at the local community college was easier.

I've never tried printing digital, but I would have a hard time believing that it was any where near as fun as printing in a darkroom.
 
I'm between a rock and a hard place.

I like wet printing. It's fun, exciting, magical etc. I place a higher value on darkroom prints, because I know just how hard it is to produce something of outstanding quality. They also are truly are handmade and there is something very special about that. There is a real sense of satisfaction in making a good wet print.

To my eye nothing beats a traditional wet print. It still is the benchmark against which all b/w photo reproduction is measured, although I have to admit that inkjets have matured considerably over the last few years and behind glass it's often difficult to tell the difference.

But my main problem with wet printing is the difficulty in making a truly high quality print. It's one thing to plink around in the darkroom and another to be a master printer. At some point you almost have to decide if you are going to become a photographer or a printer. That said there are a handful of shooters that are/were also master printers (McCullin, Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams etc), but they are far and few in between.


Ultimately I want a print that represents as close as possible what I imagine the image should look like. And personally I am only going to get that level of control from a digital process. I love the romance of the darkroom, but if I have to choose between that and getting a print that represents my vision I'm going to go with the later. Therefore I'm going to go with a high end inkjet system (Piezography K7 glossy).


If money was no object I would send my work to a lab that uses HARMAN GALERIE FB DIGITAL, which is a real Baryta/Fibre base photographic paper based upon traditional B&W silver halide technology. It has panchromatic sensitivity optimised for tricolour laser enlargers such as Durst Lambda and Océ Lightjet. This is the holy grail of b/w printing. I've seen prints made with this paper and you can't tell the difference between them and a handmade wet print, simply because they use the same materials and process (except for the actual exposure). Basically you get the best of both worlds. All the control of Photoshop and the look and feel of a traditional wet print.

But it's an expensive option and there are very few labs that offer this service. METRO in London is the inventor and developed the paper with Ilford. A&I in Los Angeles also offers this process, as does a lab in Berlin and Elevator Digital in Canada. There are a few more scattered around the globe, but not many.
 
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Bill Pierce said:
And now, just to produce some cries of outrage, the cheapest path to a good ink jet print starts with a good digital camera. (Sounds of bottles and beer cans being tossed at the message poster.)
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I hate to say it but you're right (dons helmet, dodges brick).

With film you're at the mercy of the quality of your scanner and a scanner that can wring every last ounce of information from a negative costs as much as a good car.

I have the Nikon 9000ED and it's quite good, but everyone keeps telling me it's not as good as an Imacon. When I pay for an Imacon scan there is always someone around to point out there they are not as good as a drum scan. Recently I got a drum scan and the crusty old guy behind the counter told me that as good as they are only a traditional enlarger will get the most from a negative.

You simply can't win...
;-)
 
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For B&W, wet prints retain that magic. Also love the fact that they are hand made, have incredibly depth and are analogue i.e. imperfect. You can see the touch of a living being in them and on them through the imperfection of both grain and other subtle clues. The imperfection of reality is important to me. Cleanness and perfection might seem nice but they take us further away from ourselves. I don't like that.

I am over two years into the biggest project of my life and possibly the biggest I will ever shoot and I decided to shoot film and print traditionally because of the subject matter. I wanted the viewer to look at the images and just know that they are images of real things, real moments and real circumstances. While you can mess about with prints in the darkroom, they still carry this stamp of assumed fidelity* which I feel is very important for documentary work. It has cost an arm an a leg because I have not been able to print it all, so have had to use a pro printer, but do I regret it? Not a bit. It has been a challenge to get negs to prints and prints to scans/digi copies for the internet, but I have had the time and it is not something that matters in this case I dont think. It will be done when it is done... after all, when it takes 3 years in total to shoot something, what is a 3 month wait for the exhibition prints to be finished and the website updated?

* I say this because you can mess about with traditional prints an awful lot, but the viewer at least knows you have almost certainly not added or removed things.
 
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I was never a really skilled printer. But I did enjoy wet printing. I lost my enlarger in a house fire and due to not having enough insurance, wasn't able to replace it. When I got my first scanner, flatbed with a 35mm film capability, I was happy. Prints again! But not really. Even with my Epson 4870 now, and an HP printer, I am not really happy with the prints I get. Sure they are nice and fairly easy, but they just don't seem the same. I have acquired an Omega 4x5 enlarger, some tubes and a roller motor. I need enlarger lenses and I will be off and running again.

Not great wet prints, but a lot more fun for me.
 
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