I feel at the moment that there is no need to switch. I use digital as my 35mm substitute, but still retain my medium-format and panoramic equipment. While a 16MP to 24MP camera back is still extremely expensive, it is a breeze to take a 16MP to 24MP scan off a 6x7 negative for ultimate quality.
My shooting had pretty much wound down to the point that if there was no paycheque at the end of the shoot, there was no shoot. It was not about a lack of commercial printers, but rather about a lack of opportunity to print my own stuff. I have never been able to accept a commercial print as my own work.
The exposure is only a fraction of it. That captures the raw material for the photograph, but the real art happens in the darkroom. When I closed my last fume-room in the mid-1980s, the fire of personal photography was extinguished. When I did shoot, I would barely look at the prints that came from the commercial labs. They were the lab's interpretation of my vision and rarely did they even come close. The prints had a certain homogenized quality that makes my work lose its energy.
In the first half of the last century, every photo enthusiast had their own darkroom. If you were in a camera club, you would not think of showing a print you had not made yourself - it would have been considered cheating. When colour came into popularity in the 1970s, it was pretty much the end of the personal darkroom.
Processing was not by watching the print come up in the developer tray, but by time and temperature. You had to work in total darkness, temperatures had to be held to ±¼° or ½°, and timing precise to the second. You absolutely had to have an enlarger with a colour-head, and an electronic analyzer was pretty much required as well. A bit too costly and demanding for many enthusiasts and the one-hour labs began to grow - and my photography to diminish.
The digital darkroom and to a great extent, digital cameras were my epiphany and the renaissance of photography for me. Digital prints only look as good as the original image that is sent to the printer. It is the skill of the person who processes the image that is key. Learn to process for the printer. If it is a Frontier, get the colour profile for it and process with this in your system.
I repeat - the print only reflects your skills - not the printer. Printers are incredibly good now. Even the bottom of the line Epson inkjet photoprinter will equal the quality of the best enlarger and enlarging lens, given a properly processed image. It has no intelligence of its own, and will only print what it is given to print and does so with merciless accuracy. The intelligence must come from the photographer who shoots and processes the image.
From a hardware standpoint, the monitor is key. If the monitor is wrong, the print will be wrong. If the monitor is over-bright and red-biased, your prints will be dark and blue-green - about as ugly as it gets. You compensate for the bum monitor by adding what it lacks - that is embedded in the print file - and that is what prints.
In fume-room days, if I were working on a new print for the portfolio, I would expect to take one to two days to get a perfect print, dodging and burning and fine tuning colour and exposure. I would go through an expensive box of colour paper, and the chemistry to process it. Now with accurate monitors and fine inkjet printers, if I give a friend a snapshot, it is of quality equal to the best prints in my portfolio, and it will be the first print out of the printer. I know it is perfect, before I hit "Print". In every possible way, the digital darkroom beats the old fume-room. I have zero nostalgia to go back.
Above all, it has restored the reason I went into photography in the first place - it is such fun and such a rich experience. I maintain a fairly extensive web-site with essays, tutorials and portfolios. Zero commercial prints. I take full responsibility for every image on the site, from concept through exposure, interpretation in processing to the final presentation on the page. If in the end it does not work, it is no one's fault but my own. This is what photography is about.
The digital darkroom has liberated the shooter from the blandness of the commercial lab. It has repatriated full control to anyone wanting to enjoy photography to its greatest extent. There is no feeling of pleasure like sharing a photograph that you conceived, shot, interpreted and fine tuned, printed and presented to the viewer, knowing that you had absolute control at each of these steps. If you had not noticed, we just won the revolution!
Digital cameras have extended my vision in many ways that would be totally impractical with film cameras. I have long pondered the instantaneous nature of still photographs realizing that at best, your message is only about 1/30th of a second of history. What if you could extend this to encompass a period of time in a single print? This I have explored - and I feel successfully.
While shooting film, I was constantly running up against its limitations in high-contrast situations. Using Ansel's Zone System, I was able to place the most significant information on the ideal part of the film's curve, but had to lose highlight and shadow detail. Shooting Kodachrome was a humbling experience with its incredibly short curve. Digital cameras are much like shooting Kodachrome too, however, I have discovered a way to deal with any contrast range. I can shoot interiors in daylight and have good exposures both of the interior AND the exterior. While this technique could be used in film photography, one would need pin accurate camera backs, enlargers and a pin-register easel - plus incredible patience and fume-room skills with masking. See an illustrated tutorial at
When the dynamic range is a bit shorter - but still beyond normal - the same techniques can be applied to RAW format exposures. They are 12-bits per channel and with skill one can recover some amazing shadow detail, creating glowing, luminous images. I used this technique to great advantage in very difficult venues in Las Vegas, Nevada in the USA recently. I posted them on my web-site and there has been an amazing amount of feedback from others who tried to shoot in these venues and got less than ideal results. It even works for street shooting at night, where I could do colour balancing for each area of the image, even with a different light sources. In my daily photography, it has freed me to shoot in places I would not even consider using film.
For ultimate landscapes, medium format film still wins unless one first wins the lottery. With a digital camera and a good bit of skill and Photoshop, one can do a decent 360° panorama. Skill and hard work. With my WideLuxe 140° panoramic camera, I can do it in three shots and use the most simple of Photoshop layering to accomplish the same thing. Photoshop is all my darkroom dreams come true. It is a very happy place to work.
Why switch? Add digital for the great things it can do, and use film where it is the strongest. There are no laws of monogamy and polygamy in photography. Retain the best of both - keep some film equipment to cover where digital is still weak, and use digital to liberate you from the restrictions of film. Good in combination.
Yeah, carrying medium format-hardware makes your F5 seem like a lightweight - until you see a 13x19 print come rolling out of the inkjet photo-printer.
larry!
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