1 I suppose my experience with cameras and darkrooms differs from yours. While I had the same sort of excitement of seeing the image form in the devolper, I also found it deeply frustrating since it was impossible to determine if the print was adequate under the safe light. Eventually I took to deveoping my prints face down or in complete darkness so I wouldn't be tempted to alter the development because i had been fooled by what I saw under the poor red light. I tried having others print the images, but found it impossible to communicate what I wanted in the print and so, if I wanted the prints to match what I was going for, I had to do it myself. Perhaps my fault here is a lack of patience.
2 I never really enjoyed darkroom work and eventally learned I prefered shooting transparencies because I could control the image in the camera and let it be whatever it was with out manipulation in printing. The advantage I have found in digital work is that I now have the control over the image without the frustrations (and alergic reactions) of a wet darkroom. I find I can make digital prints that are better than anything I was able to do in a darkroom. The process of arriving at the right print; getting the right paper surface, size, tonal scale, dodging and burning etc, may take as much effort as doing so in a wet darkroom, but digital systems better suit my personality.
3 I love how utilitarian Hasselblad V system cameras are. These provide exactly the features I need without a lot else to get in the way. But it is the fact that they do what I need that really appeals to me. They are tools that are well designed to help me do the thing I really care about; creating an image.
1. This I've read elsewhere, too, and it puzzles me: a red safelight was only ever used - in my pro experience - for working with line film. For bromide papers (b/white), we always used a yellow/greenish filter, which I think was called an OB or something like that. It gave a very clear indication of the way a dried print would look - and as far as memory goes, you judged the dried print to look a
tiny bit darker. But there's a caveat: in the pro world there was only one surface: WSG, and as well-glazed as Kodak would allow. Glazed gives the widest tonality that paper can offer you. (Repro houses often requested dried but unglazed glossy, but that was just to make
their job easier.) All of the other surfaces are, from a pro perspective, bullshit. They exist to make wedding couples look less pedestrian and ridiculous by the trick of disguising them beneath surface, to lend a helping hand to pictures with no intrinsic merit (think canvas today) and so on. Their purpose is, basically, disguise. In the commercial world, a print existed in order to make the final reproduction as faithful to the concept as possible, certainly without letting surface tricks intrude on intentions. Which of course, is also one of the main reasons that transparency film was rated the best of all for reproduction of colour.
So no, I wouldn't blame you for lack of
patience, simply for using the wrong safelight all that time. It's almosty impossible to process well using red, despite the fibs that feature and perpetuate the myth in every movie that shows an active darkroom scene bathed in RED! From college days I remember something called the
Purkinge Shift, which partially explains this. Incidentally, for C Prints, it was total darkness, and development by the Kodak rules, with exposure simply a product of experiments in fixed dev. time and varied exposure steps plus, of course, filtration calculations built in. (I wouldn't dream of doing E6 at home: I did Cibas for a while but not by choice!)
2. Yes, I can also make digital prints that are more
accurate interpretations of what I can achieve in micro detail simply because of Layers, but this carries a penalty: they can end up
too perfect. Is this paradox possibly also a reality? It certainly is, and to illustrate it, I must use another medium, paint, and take it to a bit of an extreme. Just think of what Van Gogh's stuff looks like, and then switch to Dali's famous works. I want my pictures to resemble the emotional look of Vincent and not the clinical look of Dali's oeuvre, maintaining, the while, their photographic integrity.
And the above, deadly, digital precision is what I dislike most about much of today's fashion and makeup photography: too much impersonal perfection in all things. Soul, the raison d'être of these two genres, has been sacrificed to artifice and falsehood. Look no futher back than at Sarah Moon's Cacharel adverts for cosmetics to see what glamour and emotional aspiration consists of, and then turn rapidly to todays stuff and ask yourself: do women
really want to look like plastic Barbies on a bad day?
3. I couldn't agree with you more: in fact, the older and possibly the physically slower that I become and the more sure of what really appeals to me in women, were those old 500 Series still in my case, the models still available to me, I'm certain I'd give up every other camera and genre and concentrate right there. And when film finally dies, I'd go with it, happy I hadn't betrayed either it or myself. I think!
;-)
Rob C
