Scanning vs. Printing in a digital world

A photo of Kera Padget shot with my 42 year old Pentax SPII on Ilford FP4-Plus.

I love to print photos in a darkroom. It is a magical place where the red safe lights glow, the radio plays, and the photographer becomes a choreographer of sorts - waving hands, adding light, and making pictures appear out of trays of chemistry.

It is so relaxing and at the same time one of the most satisfying experiences to have. Sadly printing is not done very much anymore, and photos are made with zeros and ones in the digital world, shaped and prodded with software behind a large monitor in a room.

As much as I love to print, I have come into a long stretch lately where I am just not able to get the time to make it to the darkroom. I may have a half hour or an hour of spare time here and there between tasks. I have an enlarger and trays and could convert my bathroom into a darkroom. Unfortunately it takes longer to set up and tear down than to actually make a print.

I have access to a darkroom, but it is in the next town. So in between running errands, working, sleeping, eating and the other things that fill my life I have been scanning and using a digital darkroom.

It is a love hate relationship. I have been involved with Photoshop since version 2.0. I am as comfortable behind the computer monitor as I am behind the lens of a good enlarger. I can scan just as well as I can print.

Amanda Jacobs captured with a 100 year old Box Brownie and 120 film.

The real justification for scanning vs. printing for me is to finally get the work seen. The one factor that links printing and scanning is the fact that I still love to shoot film. I feel comfortable behind the lens of a film camera. I don't need the instant gratification of a LCD screen to tell me that I was able to get the shot I wanted. Although sometimes I tend to find myself looking for that screen when I have a difficult lighting condition or am shooting in an unknown location. It is a damn crutch. This digital world of instant gratification.

That is when I remember that for years before digital I did just that: shot film in any location, under any lighting at just about any time. State basketball finals-  film. Big bank fire - film. First baby of the new year - film. No LCD. No playback. No 1000 photos to cull out a good one. Only 36 exposures (or maybe a few rolls or even less with 120) to capture the moment.

Lyosha Svinarski shot with my 42 year old Pentax SPII on Ilford FP-4 film.

Developing negatives is such an amazing experience. Getting the chance to confirm that I actually was able to get the photo that I saw in my head is absolutely one of the most soul satisfying moments.

So my work is a hybrid of old school film and new technology in the digital darkroom.  My friend and former coworker Tom Sistak said that "You can't put the genie back in the bottle."  I may not be able to stop the march of photography from analog to digital, but I am using the technology I have available to make it possible to continue to still shoot film in this digital world.

Shooting with film makes me a better photographer. It makes me think about lighting and composition, and with the limited frame count it also makes each frame special and not just a series of clicks until getting the right one.

So.... I am scanning.  At the end of the day, for me anyway, I am still shooting film. That is what counts.

Pinhole camera fun!

I have been making pinhole cameras since my college days. A pinhole camera is amazingly simple technology. All that is needed is a light tight container of some sort with a pinhole poked in it to let in light.

These cameras can be as simple or as complexed as you want them to be. I have used many different containers from cookie tins, cardboard boxes and my favorite; mini Pringles chip cans.

Earlier this week I built a pinhole camera out of an old Kodak paper box left over from my newspaper days. In fact this particular box came from The Times in Ottawa, because it was the last newspaper I worked at where we actually made black and white prints from negatives. Shortly after I started, we started scanning everything, so this box is probably about 20 years old by now. This box had some photo junk in it of some sort, stored away in the back of a closet. I freed the box from it's lowly storage life and made it into a camera!

My Kodak "Professional" pinhole camera.

The "lens" of the camera is a piece of aluminum liberated from a pop can. A Sun Drop pop can to be exact. A sewing needle is gently drilled through the aluminum, and then it is lightly sanded to remove the burr and then taped to the front of the box. You can see my fancy tape job as well as my tape "shutter"  which is just a piece of black electrical tape.

The "film" in this particular camera is 8x10 photographic paper. Photographic paper is light sensitive, and I think has an ISO rating of about 3 which makes it a pretty slow emulsion. Not quite as slow as wet plate collodion, but still pretty slow. You can use regular film in your pinhole camera, I just like the ease of loading a camera with photo paper, because you can load and unload the camera in a red safe light darkroom.

Here is the camera, with the "film"  some Ilford pearl finish RC paper. Ilford paper in a Kodak box, that is just blasphemy!

 After building the camera, I took it outside and made some exposures. After a little bit of trial and error, I found the magic exposure number to be about one minute under mostly overcast afternoon skies.

The photos were processed in a makeshift darkroom in my windowless bathroom. All that was needed was a card table, one safe light, trays and photo chemistry.

My pinhole darkroom under safelight conditions.

A negative sits in the fix, after being developed.

As you can see from the above photo, the negatives are nice and large. The size of the box determines the focal length, and this particular box becomes a super wide angle 8x10 camera. It vignettes a bit on the negative, but I like the effect.

A series of six 8x10 paper negatives drying after being developed and washed.

And the result: Pretty nice photos! The images are fairly crisp and have a good exposure. Pinhole cameras are a fun way to learn about photography, because of their simple design and the inexpensive materials needed to make images.

A view of my back yard. The heart shaped mark was made by my kids, when they built their snowman. You can just barely see the snowman in the lower right corner of the photo.

A self portrait on the back stairs of my deck. I did pretty good sitting still for a minute long exposure!