For better or worse, it’s the same me, Popnfresh – the one who spent years and years in a home attic darkroom trying to come to grips with the challenges of producing a decent print containing a pure white and a pure black and including as many shades of grey as the paper would yield. At the end of all that, I wouldn’t say I was very technically accomplished – maybe clumsily competent. Recently, I did a trawl of all my bw negs and threw about half of them in the bin on technical grounds alone. With the benefit of 25 years hindsight, they were woeful in every technical way – but was there any other way to learn? So, sorry, Russ, no big secret. Just application, learning the hard way and reading everything I could find on the subject. But, boy, it was a lot of fun at the time!
- Seamus