Would you give up rangefinder photography without BW wet prints?

[mh2000]

sure, I've made contact sheets for years as well... but you have to set up your darkroom etc. etc. to get them made, wait for them to dry etc... and with 35mm view them with a loupe... stopping at Walgreens to get a stack of proofs and then immediately setting to work on the ones you want to enlarge is a great time savings...

as to the gallery... I think the bottom line is that you can show in a gallery with either traditional prints or fine inkjet prints.

Contact sheets are the traditional "cheap proofs". Generations of photographers, editors, and art directors managed to work with them, just like they looked at pages of color slides on a light table.

The gallery where I show puts a little card next to each piece telling the medium. With B&W prints it will say either "silver print" or "ink jet print".

 

[mh2000]

when you get your paper and settings down the R2400 can produce stellar b&w prints... I use a HP 8750 because I think it looks more like a traditional print... (my gallery didn't put up a sign saying which is which and no one ever suspected they were from an inkjet....

mh2000:

I have an Epson R2400 wide-carriage printer with, among other inks, matte black, light black, and light-light black. I think it's the type of printer you mentioned?

 

[mh2000]

PS Current favorite RF camera... Retina IIa! 🙂

(I just love shooting that camera)

 

[trix]

Get an Epson pigment printer or HP *dye-based* printer that does blank and white prints and you may end up loving scanning.

I have done that for 7 years from 1997-2004 but i did not like it. Today i wonder why the hell i wasted so much time.

You will get *real* b&w prints that look great... and that, along with shooting cameras you love is what it is all about, right?

Thats what i do, i get real prints, not something that looks like a *real* print ;-)

 

[phc]

My current workflow involves shooting film, giving it to a lab who dev it and scan each frame at about 4mb size. I can edit and categorise on the Mac, get the pics I need scanned at high res (around 60mb), or send them to a printer (I mean a person who prints, not a grey plastic box - currently this is Robin Bell in London).

Cheers, Paul.

 

[rbsinto]

Am I the only person here who shoots nothing but colour slide film with both my SLRs and rangefinder cameras?
So having said that, my answer to the original question is, no.

 

[Dogman]

On New Years day I dumped all my darkroom chemicals. My equipment has been collecting dust for months due to general sloth and a lack of time and motivation. I've been shooting with digital cameras more and more. I've satisfied myself that a black and white inkjet print is now more than adequate for my purposes. Several months ago I bought an Epson V700 scanner that I have not used much at all because I was shooting everything digitally. The scans I did get from the V700 of 35mm and medium format black and white film looks pretty good to me. I have a freezer with about 300 rolls of 35mm and 120 black and white film stored away. There are lots of possibilities open right now. I believe it is time to reassess.

As long as I can shoot pictures that interest me and make prints that are satisfactory, the method no longer matters.

 

[hawkeye]

The rangefinder is at the heart of my photography. It is where my heart and eye find cohesion.

Photography for me has always been about recording what I see which is different from what is in front of me. It is my response to the intersections of time and space.

I started processing and printing like so many others in a closet that grew to a studio apartment and ended up in a professional darkroom in a photo studio. But my BW work ended with the demands of the marketplace which in the 1970s and 1980s turned away from BW and demanded color transparencies. The darkroom lingered but by 1995 was gone.

But the stack of big prints I've made since those days has grown not shrunk and now they are mostly color.

And I struggled with the transition from BW to color back in the 1990s. Luckily I had spent some time with Ernest Haas who had gone through a similar moment in his career. His attitude was to hell with belief systems (like the only good photos are BW) and just enjoy doing this crazy thing we all love to do.

Steve