I grew up in this business as a lab rat. My first job was printing b/w portraits for a local portrait photographer. I "graduated" to an A/V house where we did a little bit of everything from film edit, slide presentation, and lots of darkroom stuff for a few big industrial clients. I learned a lot there...optical printers, Oxberry animation cameras, dip and dunks, color printing and of course b/w printing. We used to make 200-500 each of a neg for one client. 8x10 copy negs of retouched images ( including opaqued out backgrounds..some of those painting artists where amazing) printed on a moving platen contact printer with a dozen bulbs on movable arms to dodge and burn. Processed 25 or more at a time by hand in big deep trays, then dried ( we were using fiber single weight) on a big Pako Superdrum Ferrotype dryer. Man it was old school! I had brown fingers until I moved out of the B/W darkroom. But it was an amaing education for lots of lab techniques.
I went on to a gbig ommercial studio and ran E-6. C-41 and RA-4 in Hope roller transport processors before I got the chance to start shooting....
Bulk hand-printing 8x10s in a dish was something I learned to do in my early days in an industrial company's darkroom. After that, I ended up doing the colour darkroom stuff, mostly all on my own, which I rather liked. None of it was, to me, interesting photography, and making endless series of prints of broken jet engine turbine blades could have been mind-numbing, but getting a b/w print to look exactly like a grey, metal blade took some doing and was a marvellous learning opportunity. It was even more of a challenge in colour, because with much of that work of other engine parts, the colour was crucial for the engineers who could read the colours as indicating temperatures to which the parts had been exposed.
Sometimes I would be handed a small strip of motion film with a marked frame from which to make a copy negative and then a matching print. I could so easily spend an entire Sunday of overtime getting that baby to bed.
The beauty of that job was that it was a service department with no restrictions on materials usage: get it right was all that counted. What an amazing opportunity to learn how far you could take printing.
When I left industrial employment to go solo, that b/w bulk-printing experience really paid off when I got into fashion work, and shooting PR fashion pix for manufactures. Doing so much darkroom printing is why I think I found adapting to how good a digital print could become was already second-nature.
Rob
