How many people print wet rather than digital?

[Bob Helmond]

Digital is okay, but entering a dimly lighted sanctuary of bubbling, gurgling water and the incense-like smell of hypo is where I have always loved to be. To view the magic coming up through the developer, judging it, perhaps rubbing a little phenidone here are there and then the final view in white light in the fixer to see if any ferricyanide is required is where it all comes together.

 

[Erik van Straten]

gelatin silver print (summar 50mm f2) leica lll

Amsterdam, Plantage Muidergracht, 2023

 

[38Deardorff]

Digital is okay, but entering a dimly lighted sanctuary of bubbling, gurgling water and the incense-like smell of hypo is where I have always loved to be. To view the magic coming up through the developer, judging it, perhaps rubbing a little phenidone here are there and then the final view in white light in the fixer to see if any ferricyanide is required is where it all comes together.

Exactly, I learned to print in the high school darkroom, after university and many years of sending films to labs or shooting 10,000 Kodachromes, having a darkroom to work in was like coming home.

 

[Godfrey]

I guess I'll have to be odd man out. I started doing my own developing and printing when I was 8 yo (1962) and sold off my last darkroom (enlarger, trays, safelights, etc) about 1995... 33 years is enough of that for me.

The entirety of my film processing gear fits into a two cubic foot box now, and the several hundred rolls of film I've processed since 1995, plus much of the legacy work from before that, now consume some tens of gigabytes on a hard drive. I never sent any b&w work out for processing.

Color work i used to have processed but i always shot b&w ten to one hundred times as much as color. Thats all on the hard drive now too.

I've only rarely sent any work out for printing, usually only for special processing of one sort or another. To me, sending work out to be printed kinda dilutes the intent of doing my photography.

G