The Online Photographer

Editing by Magic

Carl's recent posts about editing and the comments they've evoked have brought up so many thoughts that I could probably write five long posts about it. If not ten. (If you just blurted out, "oh, no!" never fear, that wasn't actually a threat.)

One thing leapt to mind. I've been taking golf lessons recently for the first time in my life (it's never too late for golf; it is too late for platform diving), and one thing my pro keeps saying is "make it yours." That is, he wants me to work out things for myself. And of course, each of us needs to "make our own" a great many facets of our pursuit / passion / profession / hobby / diversion of photography, starting with how serious we're going to be about it and what our aims are. The comments to Carl's posts make it clear that a lot of people have developed their own methods of editing. Which of course doesn't mean that it still might not help to talk about it.

I wanted to post a sort of counterpoint to Carl's article, in order to point out that he's talking about working out a method and then following the method through. He's not saying, "use the software I use, follow my method slavishly."

Sorry about this overlong preamble, but I also need to make a disclaimer: I'm not a guru. My way is not the right way. So don't take what I'm about to tell you as gospel; don't even take it as a recommendation, unless you want to. I'm not trying to tell you the "right" way to do things, even if I believed there was such a thing, which I don't.

Get to the point, Mike!
Anyway, when I had my chops up, here's how I worked. I developed either one or two tanks of film (three rolls of 35 exposures* each per tank) once every few nights. (Less in winter, more in summer.) I'd hang the film in the closet to dry, clip it and put it into PrintFile pages the next morning (this was my most hated photographic chore, by the way), then, when dark fell, I'd make proof sheets. (My darkrooms, always crude affairs, were almost never light-tight enough to use when the sun was out.)

In looking at the proof sheets, I had a couple of rules for myself. First, I had to loupe every frame. Second, I had to mark between one and six pictures per roll. It didn't matter if it was the stupidest, ugliest roll of useless pictures I'd ever taken, I had to find at least one frame to workprint. And I strongly resisted making workprints of more than six frames per roll. Oh, of course if I really, really had to see that seventh or eighth frame, I'd do it; but the reason for the six-frames rule was that if I marked 20 frames or 25 frames on every roll, it would be too much work to workprint (and too expensive), and I'd procrastinate and never get to it. So I had a method: every frame that interested me under the loupe first got a single cross mark in the corner; if there were more than six, I had to winnow them down to six, then I would put a second cross-mark, making an "X", on the ones to be printed.

Do you see that those "rules" were just an effort to cope with my particular psychology, my personal weaknesses? I didn't want to be tempted to throw a roll aside just because there wasn't much good on it; I knew I'd miss some good frames that way. I had to force myself to deal with every roll when workprinting. And I didn't want to trigger my tendency to procrastinate. These are my own personal solutions to my own personal idiosyncrasies. They have no more significance than that.

I was an effing ninja at workprinting. I could make twenty prints in an hour just cruising; thirty to forty an hour if I was trying. After years in the darkroom, I had no trouble looking at the neg against the safelight and setting the time and contrast to "good enough" with nothing more than a glance. Most of my workprints look pretty good, too, if I do say so.

Workprints. I made a gazillion of these over the years. No exaggeration**.

So here's the thing I started out to say: I have to have prints in order to edit.

And here's why. If I took, say, fifteen of those 8x10 workprints and taped them all up on the wall, they would all look more or less the same to me at first. And I'd look at them. Then I'd look at them some more. And some more. Gradually, I would start to get interested in a few of them more than others, and some would begin to drop into the don't-care category. And this is the mystery: after about three or four days of looking at a batch of workprints, chances are I would love two or three of them and not care at all about the rest. 

How did this happen? I really have no idea. Still don't, to this day.

But I could depend on it.

I finally decided that it was just not entirely conscious. It's not like I was "deciding" which pictures were "good" and which weren't; it's just that some of them had that "it," whatever it is that I personally happen to find gratifying about photographs, and the others didn't. 

There have been all kinds of things I've learned about myself along the way. For one thing, "good" pictures—the solid, good-looking, pictures-that-look-like-everybody-else's-good-pictures pictures—seldom made it for me. And, the things I liked were often quiet, sometimes too quiet for others.

I sometimes liked failures, too...pictures that were intriguing for some reason but...well, bad. I had a separate category for these, called "significant failures."

Sometimes I'd put 20 prints up and, after three days, it had become obvious that none of them were any good. That was always dispiriting, but it wasn't all that unusual.

So what accounts for that magical "sorting" process that almost always occurred half a week or so after I slapped a bunch of seemingly identical-quality workprints up on the wall and just looked and looked and looked? I just don't know. I only know that it was the way my brain worked when it came to photographs. 

Paper is wealth
The end of the process was that when I could spare the time and the money (paper was wealth, for most of my adult life; I almost never had enough paper) I would go into the darkroom and make a fine (finished) print from the negative. I always had a reputation as a fine printer—it was how I made a good bit of my living for a good long stretch, and I'm happy to say that some prints made by me reside in some very prestigious museums and collections—but I never enjoyed this part quite as much. It was too final, and few fine prints were fine enough, if you get my drift. I probably only made "finished" fine prints out of, I don't know, maybe a third of my sorted "selects." In a sense, there was no reason to—I didn't have shows, and nobody bought them. I was just doing it because I liked it. (Same reason you play golf. Who cares except you?) But workprinting for me was the center around which everything else revolved. I loved seeing what the negatives looked like, and I loved anticipating the magic "editing" process that would follow. 

I can't do the same thing on the computer screen. I have no good method there. That's not a value judgment, not an anti-digital comment. It's just a fact. I need prints on the wall. I need to be able to do lots of looking. It's just the way I am.

I've never counted exactly, but I believe I have about 85,000 negatives***, and although I've lost or left behind most of the workprints I've made, I probably have a few thousand of those hanging around the house. I really should be responsible to that work, and attempt to edit a book of pictures out of it—maybe even two. It's another one of those things I've always put off to "someday." That's the kind of task that requires that you be systematic and organized, and I am neither. I'm not looking forward to trying. But...someday.

I hope it won't be hard to see how very different Carl's method of editing a large set of digital captures (something I've never even done, because I've never made a large set of digital captures) is from my method of working with rolls of 35mm film.

We're all different. You've got to make it yours.

Mike

*Only 35 frames fit on the kind of PrintFile sheet I used, so that's how many pictures I shot on a roll, never 36.

**Well, slight exaggeration.

***Sounds like a lot, but it only averages to about two and a half rolls a week over twenty years.

ADDENDUM: A great tip for those still doing 35mm black-and-white. If you happen to use an Omega or LPL 4x5 enlarger (the latter being the best enlargers ever made, and now imported into the U.S. by Omega, formerly by Saunders, they of the easels), get yourself an LPL 4x5 glass carrier (has to be the LPL one, the Omega won't work). If you cut your negatives in strips of six, and you carefully overlap the clear sprocket-holed edges of the film, you can just fit nine 35mm frames into the carrier. Then you can enlarge all nine frame together onto whatever size sheet of paper you can afford and want to handle—11x14 or 16x20. Four sheets and you've done a roll of 36. It replaces both contact sheet and work prints. I could never quite get it together to work this way, but I always wanted to. It's very luxurious and very nice.

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Featured Comment by Gary: "I agree about the importance of work prints, but I still find the digital work flow to be a big improvement to that of 35mm film.

"The thing is, I don't use on-screen viewing to replace the work print stage, but rather the contact sheet stage. The curse of 35mm is that you can't really see what you've got squinting at a contact sheet with a lupe and so, must make enlargements of many frames just to see what's there. Doing the initial viewing on screen seems a big improvement to me.

"With digital, the second stage (work prints) is still there and just as important, but getting there is easier. And not just with regards to selection, but physically, too. I can shoot JPEG or JPEG + raw, use the JPEG for intitial viewing and make a workprint from it at the push of a button. Keep the raw for the final print if needed.

"I'm amused when I sometimes hear people on forums ask how they can make a contact sheet from their digital files."

Time to Order Your Odd-Format Ilford Sheet Film

By Oren Grad

Calling all funky format fans: the annual special order period for Ilford FP4 Plus and HP5 Plus sheet film in sizes to fit a wide range of antique and specialty cameras is now open. Prepaid orders can be placed until July 3, with delivery expected in September.

With a couple of last-minute additions, this year’s program offers these two modern emulsions in a total of 20 different formats that aren’t normally available from dealer stock: 2.25x3.25”, 6.5x9cm, 3x4”, 3.25x4.25”, 9x12cm, 4x10”, 13x18cm, 5x12”, 6.5x8.5”, 18x24cm, 7x11”, 7x17”, 8x20”, 10x12”, 11x14”, 14x14”, 12x20”, 14x17”, 16x20”, and 20x24”.

Dealers participating in this year’s program are:

USA
Badger Graphic Sales, Kaukauna, WI
Hunt’s Photo and Video, Melrose, MA
Freestyle Sales, Los Angeles, CA
Keeble & Shuchat, Palo Alto, CA
The View Camera Store, Fountain Hills, AZ
Glazers Camera, Seattle, WA
Midwest Photo Exchange, Columbus, OH
Looking Glass Photo, Berkeley, CA

Canada
Big Camera Workshops, Burlington, Ontario
The Camera Store, Calgary, Alberta
Beau Photo Supplies, Vancouver, British Columbia.

United Kingdom
Silverprint, London
Morco, Nottinghamshire
Robert White, Dorset

 
A Canham 4x10

Oren

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The Accommodating Darkroom

A friend wrote to ask, why the recent posts about darkrooms? I don't know, really. To pass the time until the long-awaited Olympus shows up in the middle of June? Guilt, after having suggested that Leica-for-a-year, one-camera-one-lens, B&W-only exercise, thus consigning fully converted, Kool-Aid quaffing devotees to actual antediluvian darkroom labor? Narcissism of the nostalgic variety? (It's been nearly a decade since I set foot in a darkroom myself. It is almost surreal that I can say that.)

Whatever. Another reason: it's fun to think about it again, after all this time.

Here are a few interlacing principles of darkroom organization. As you'll notice, some of these aren't entirely separate, and some of them are in mild conflict with each other.

1. The fewer things you intend to do in a darkroom, the easier it is to plan and set up. That is, if you have simplified your working methods to one technique, or just a few related techniques, your darkroom can be fairly simple and straightforward. Edward Weston's was—all he did was develop 8x10 film and contact-print it. That's probably the simplest, most basic technique there is; it's also one of the cheapest (on the darkroom side at least), and requires the most utterly simple darkroom. You don't even really need an enlarger.

It does, however, conflict with the second principle, which is:

2. The simpler and more limited your darkroom setup, the fewer things you can do in it. This is relevant because some people like to use the darkroom as a laboratory, to explore all sorts of different techniques, formulas, alternative processes, printing ideas, on and on. When I was at the darkroom magazine, I noticed that a lot of readers would use our articles as suggestions of new things to try. They weren't just about making photographs; they wanted to try all sorts of different neat things in the darkroom. Sort of like a succession of science experiments. Obviously, if this is your bent, you're going to need a workspace that's more flexible, one that's not built around limitations.

3. The smaller the largest print you will make, the simpler and more space-efficient the darkroom can be, and the less your related equipment will cost. The corollary is naturally also true. Making extremely large wet prints is a virtuoso skill, requiring all sorts of specialized equipment and specific techniques. Charles Phillips is the extreme case, although, unfortunately, I don't know of a good, easily accessible written description of his processes; suffice it to say that his "tray" was a giant custom-made chemical bath that held the paper stationary and pumped all the solutions (developer, stop, fix, wash) through in sequence. The largest prints I ever made myself were about 4' x 4', and even those weren't trivial, despite not being all that big. But if all you're going to make are 8x10s, you're going to have it nice and easy.

4. The smaller and handier the camera, the easier a time you will have in the field (i.e., when you're out actually shooting). But the larger the negative, the easier a time you will have in the darkroom. The two are a tradeoff. Easy in the field = tough in the darkroom. Tough in the field = easy in the darkroom. Well, maybe "easy" isn't quite the right word, but more satisfying and less of a struggle. It takes concentration and good technique to print 35mm negs well. Good 4x5 negs are more of a pleasure to print, and often much more gratifying because they make much higher quality prints more readily. Medium format splits that difference.

4. There are only a few aspects of a darkroom that are critical to its performance—the rest have to do with comfort and convenience. We'll get to the details later.

5. The more comfortable and convenient a darkroom is, the nicer it is to work in. And the nicer it is to be in, the more you will want to be in it, and (presumably) the better work you will do. Brett Weston used to do darkroom work only on moonless nights, with the windows of his Hawaiian house thrown open to the ocean breezes. I doubt I've ever heard of a nicer darkroom to work in.

A darkroom is a workroom
Now then. As you might imagine if you've been reading my patter for a while, I like simplicity, and I like limits. This is a matter of taste and temperament. Some of you reading this, and doubtless some of the people who will comment, are of different temperament. Humans do vary. Here, I'm going to describe my own ideal darkroom, and I'm going to leave it to you to realize that a) my ideals might not suit everybody, and b) they might not suit you.

To start with, I'd suggest choosing between 11x14" and 16x20" as your maximum print size, so you can buy your trays, easel, and paper safe accordingly. I've mostly shot 35mm, so I'm fine with a maximum paper size of 11x14. If you shoot much medium format, then I'd probably recommend 16x20 as a max. Note that if you run too many sizes and they're too disparate, then you're going to need multiple sets of trays, and possibly more than one easel. If you settle on 11x14, you can use the same trays for 8x10" without wasting much in the way of chemicals. If you have 16x20 trays for big prints, you will probably also need a set of smaller trays for smaller prints. You don't want to have to fill a set of 16x20 trays with chemicals just to run a few 8x10 contact sheets.

Second, in my opinion a darkroom is a workroom. I have tolerance for, but not much interest in, those whose goal is to make the darkroom itself a showpiece. I knew one very ingenious photographer who worked for a number of years constructing "the perfect darkroom"—it was very complex, had all manner of sophisticated innovations (including automatic tray rockers, which to me is like having a machine to put your socks on), and was highly customized. I was very impressed—until I contacted him several years later. Seems he hardly ever used his darkroom. His enthusiasm and passion was for design and construction, not for darkroom work. Then he had to move, and that was the end of that.

Similarly, I knew of a carpenter whose entire darkroom was constructed of superior materials, put together to a standard higher than that of average dining room furniture. His handmade wooden sink had several coats of glossy enamel and gorgeous teak accents; driving a nail into it would have amounted to vandalism. Now, I'm aware the some people trick out even their garages, but I'm of the opinion that workspaces are more effective when they're utilitarian. I would say that a darkroom is most comfortable to me when I feel no reluctance to pound a nail in somewhere to hang something from. I would have some raw 2x4 showing here and there and perhaps slap a piece of masonite pegboard on the wall somewhere just to keep it all in perspective. It's a workroom. Make it pleasant, but utilitarian.

The perfect darkroom for me would be a room not in a basement about the size of an average secondary (i.e., not master) bedroom, with an 8' or higher ceiling and one window. It would have some piece of furniture to set the enlarger on, preferably something fairly sturdy. In an old house with flexible subfloors, a wall-mounted shelf might work best, especially if there is other activity in the building. Often, if there is a corner formed by two structural walls, this makes the most stable area for an enlarger stand. A wall-mounted stand is better affixed to a structural wall than to a non-structural wall that's just sitting on the subfloor. Use common sense.

The room would be painted white or off-white (there's no reason for a private darkroom to be painted black).

And it would have no sink. Well, if I were really after the utmost in luxury it might have a laundry-type sink somewhere, perhaps even in the room if I really wanted to get fancy. But it would have no darkroom sink.

A typical laundry or utility sink

-

A photo by Nina M. Westerberg of a typical stainless steel darkroom sink, in this case at the Washington State University Vancouver Darkroom Club

My darkroom would have just a plain formica countertop for the trays (a.k.a. the "wet side"). Most home supply stores sell six- or eight-foot lengths of pre-made countertop for modest prices—cosmetic seconds are even cheaper and would be fine for a darkroom. And most people handy enough to attempt darkroom work can contrive to whack together a structure sufficient to hold said countertop up in the air, perhaps using the aforementioned raw 2x4s.

Alternatively, white melamine work tables, also available at home supply stores, work fine too, although they're a little too low for me personally (I'm 6'1") and the 4-foot length of most of them is a bit short for anything but 8x10 trays, although you can use two set end-to-end if you have the room. If you can find one that's six feet long and that has height adjustment, you're good to go.

Why countertop? I've just always preferred it, is all. All you have to do is try not to spill too much. If you have a tendency to slosh solution out of the trays when agitating, just buy trays with higher sides. At the end of the session, wipe the table or countertop down with a wet sponge. It works fine. No need for a $3,000 18/8 stainless steel sink in a home darkroom.

That's all for today, lest this get too long. Coming up: Performance features of a darkroom, and comfort features, and a few more thoughts about water management.

Mike

Darkroom Equipment

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Featured Comment by hugh crawford: "Think about cleaning the darkroom when you plan it. A shiny floor that you can wet mop is a very good idea. Smooth walls and ceiling that are painted with washable semi gloss paint are a good thing. Storing dust catching stuff that you don't use for printing in the darkroom is a bad idea. If you can wipe down everything in the darkroom including walls and floor in about 10 minutes you are in the ballpark. One of my teachers said that every minute spent cleaning the darkroom is worth an hour of cleaning negatives and spotting prints, and I think that is an understatement."

Thirty Years Past Peak

I should add to the post below that I when I think about darkrooms, I think about black-and-white. I would never consider a darkroom again if my intent were to make fine color prints (I happen to find B&W more appealing, but that's my personal taste). Carl Weese said in about 1999 that black-and-white was perfect as it was, but digital represented the true coming of age of color; with apologies to the several excellent traditional color photographer/printers I know, I concur. For me, the darkroom would be for monochrome; for color work, it's the computer all the way.

A computer workstation is much smaller, much more portable, and can be used out in the light, where people congregate. Naturally this negates what for some of us is an advantage of the darkroom—its function as a sanctuary, away from interruptions and from other obligations. But there are good reasons to want to be around people apart from being sociable. George Tice reportedly had a picture-window in his darkroom (covered in rubylith of course) that looked out on his children's playroom, so he could work and babysit at the same time.

Not only is the darkroom a problem during the years when one's children are small and need room and attention themselves, but, as many people in the comments have cumulatively noted, what Nick Hartmann calls "the room-sized accessory" is problematic as one charts a course through life, too. Americans might typically live in a house when they're young (their parents'), and a house when they're older (their own), but the years in the middle there can be more provisional in terms of living arrangements: dorms, followed by apartments, usually, with frequent uprootings. What this means in practice is that, for many people, their participation in darkroom activities is fractured as they go through life. At the darkroom magazine where I worked, I used the term "re-entry photographer" for the hobbyist who was rekindling, in retirement, an earlier interest in photography. The category was a significant segment of the readership (it kept the average subscriber age remarkably high, too).

In fact, the popularity of darkrooms initially had to do with the rise of home ownership in this country after WWII. To have a darkroom meant you had the space to devote to it; it usually implied that you had a habitable basement, which in turn implied that you belonged to that expanding class of arriviste, the homeowner. Part of the status of having a darkroom was that you usually had to have space to burn in order to have one.

The peak of the darkroom as a home hobby in the U.S. occurred in 1979, indicated by a peak in enlarger sales and in the circulations of darkroom hobby publications. The first big contraction came during the Gulf War. The second, more protracted (and more extreme) has taken place over the last 15 years, especially during the years from 2000 to 2005, as traditional wet processes were replaced by digital cameras and inkjet printers. By the mid-to-late '90s, the sales of enlargers, once a robust industry, had fallen such that the entire industry was selling considerably less than Beseler once sold all by itself. Today, annual worldwide sales of new enlargers of all brands is probably in the mid- to high hundreds, or less than 1% of what it once was.

Of course, one thing this has meant is that darkroom work is a much more exclusive activity these days. It's a much smaller club, but the people who have stuck with it tend to be passionate, involved, and quite skilled and knowledgable. In addition, we know much more about how to do fine work now than we did even as recently as the peak, thirty years ago. Certainly the average level of craftsmanship among darkroom workers is far higher now than it ever was when so many people were dabbling in it.

There are far fewer professionals now, but contrary to common belief, amateur status is just as often a determinant of quality as a lack of it. A pro gets very good at working fast, but efficiency is closely tied to the bottom line, so excessive time and care simply can't be lavished on any one print. Amateurs run the risk of working so little and so infrequently that they never get their skills in decent shape, but they also have the luxury of being able to put a lot of time and careful judgement into each print. Pros make good prints, but the very best prints (as well as the worst, I would imagine) tend to be produced by artists and amateurs.

Over the two decades from 1980 to 2000, I worked in many darkrooms (twelve, to be precise—I just counted 'em up), and more of them than not were highly provisional: only a few of mine were plumbed, and one, in a "vintage" apartment in Chicago, was a kitchen. ("Vintage" in real-estate-speak means "old and unrenovated.") The two best ones were owned by Paul Kennedy, one in his pro studio and the other in his basement, which we built after Paul realized he could do 90% of his non-location work in his garage and forego the heavy monthly studio rent. One of my darkrooms, but only one, was so cramped and primitive as to be essentially unusable even for me. And I can do good work in pretty primitive conditions.

Despite the idealized, heavily equipped darkrooms that are shown in how-to books, a great darkroom can actually be very simple. If I find time, I'll go into some particulars later in the week.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Dennis: "So I stopped in Best Buy today at lunch time, breezed through the digital cameras on my way to the computer section, then on my way out the door had to do a double take as there was a big rack of new...vinyl albums. Yup. Saw these thin square packages that looked like albums and figured it was retro packaging for something else, but no...there was a sign saying to stop by aisle one of the music section for more vinyl.

"Sounds like someone didn't get the memo.

"Or maybe in another ten years there will be a similar display featuring film and film cameras."

Darkroom as Recreation

H.H. Bennett's Darkroom

Darkroom is on the way out, on the way down, Banco Unpopular. Easy to kick, backward-looking, subject to ridicule (gentle and otherwise).

But there's nothing inherently wrong with darkrooms. They have at least one good thing going for them: they're not computers. Anybody out there dying to spend more time at the computer? Are there legions of people today who prize what little computer time they get, and just feel they do not spend enough hours basking in the glow of monitors and clacking away at various sizes and kinds of keyboard? Just aching for some valid excuse to spend just a little more time that way? Any excuse will do?

I'll grant you that if the darkroom is a necessity, it's an evil one. It's inefficient and expensive and seldom done right. If you hate it—and more people hated it than loved it—then being forced to do it is like being forced to do your own car maintenance or home remodeling.

But here's a news flash. Sometimes, some people do certain things simply because they enjoy doing them.

Even difficult, inefficient things.

For example, I hear some people enjoy cooking. I hear they do it on purpose. I can hardly boil soup, and just being in the kitchen stresses me out. One of my standard lottery dreams—how I'd live if I were ever big rich, admittedly a diminishing prospect—is that I'd have other people cook my food 24/7. I would never cook, and I would never again set foot in a grocery store. But some people cook because they enjoy it: for them, it's a recreation. The same can be said of gardening, woodworking, sewing, all sorts of things that for other people are chores—yes, even working on cars. My next door neighbor worked off and on for years restoring an incredibly decrepit MG Midget, and I have to say that when he finished, I was completely astonished: it was just the kind of project that I might start in a quixotic flush of completely misdirected enthusiasm but which would defeat me almost by definition, and yet he not only did it, he did a great job—his teenage son was soon to be seen zooming around the neighborhood in a gleaming little car with a nice throaty exhaust note, the envy of all. Well, at least, the envy of improbable audiences such as the middle-aged gentleman next door.

In my considered judgment (and remember, I used to be the Editor-in-Chief of a darkroom magazine) somewhere between one in six and one in ten photographers, back in the days of film, enjoyed darkroom work. Some did it because for them, it was a recreation. Here's a shocker: for some, neither the finished prints nor the practice of photography was the main attraction of work with a camera; they actually liked darkroom work above everything else in the hobby. I'm thinking of real people here. I'm not making this up.

As history proceeds, fewer and fewer people will ever set foot in a darkroom. Most won't mind. So how would you know if you might enjoy it? Here are a few clues. You might enjoy darkroom work if:

• You're an introvert
• You like to see what you're doing, as opposed to figuring it out with directions, like a puzzle, or by measurement or theory
• You find it gratifying to create something tangible as an end product
• You have the time to devote to it
• You have the space to devote to it
• You're able to obsess about the right details and let the wrong ones go
• You don't have kids who need your active presence
• You could use a place to get away

Most of all—and I fear you can only get this by trial—the darkroom might be good for you if you find it relaxing and peaceful to be in it doing the kind of work that is done there. For some people, it created stress, I'm sure, like cooking creates stress in me. For others, it relieves stress. I'm one of those. In the comments today, reader JonA says, "I have been reading about positive psychology, and one of the ways to make yourself happy is to get into what Mike Csikszentmihalyi calls 'flow.' It involves tasks that provide people with gratification but they cannot quite explain why they are happy. The components of these tasks are: requiring skill and concentration, there are clear goals, you get immediate feedback, you feel effortless involvement and a sense of control, your sense of self vanishes, and time flies by without you noticing it."

I've never read about Csikszentmihalyi or "flow," but this passage describes with uncanny accuracy how darkroom work always made me feel. There were times I didn't enjoy it, of course (at one time I did it for a living, and work is work), but at its best, that's the way it was. I imagine that when my kid leaves home, I'll get back into it—not to replace the computer, not to turn my back on digital (I don't imagine I'll ever do that) but simply for enjoyment.

And because what's left of my life is too short a time to learn to build a wooden boat or restore an antique car.

Or concoct a credible bouillebaisse.

Mike

Illustration: A costumed interpreter portraying pioneering landscape photographer H. H. Bennett mixes photo chemicals in the same darkroom where Bennett himself developed his stunning images of the rugged Wisconsin Dells that would draw tourists by the trainload to the area beginning in the late 19th century. (Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society.)

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Featured Comment by Doug Howk: "A kindred spirit. I work as a database administrator, and about the last thing I want to do is spend mornings and weekends looking at a monitor. Hands-on craftsmanship whether repairing a wooden large format camera or actually creating prints creates a sense of serenity. For me, its part of the good life well lived."

Featured Comment by Paul Butzi: "There was a large subset of the participants of rec.photo.darkroom for whom the darkroom work was the most enjoyable part of the photographic process.

"It was a large enough group that at one point I proposed starting a small company to serve that market. The main product would be film, in various formats, that had been carefully exposed to various conventional landscape compositions.

"The marketing slogan I came up with for this product was 'We push the button. You do the rest.'"

Featured Comment by Kamal Marhubi: "'Mike' Csikszentmihalyi is actually called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I think it's pronounced roughly like 'Me-hi chicks-sent-me-hi.' He has a couple of books on the subject of flow, and has done a lot of research on it. I recommend giving Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience a read; fascinating and insightful."

Featured Comment by Rod: "Here are some more attributes that might signal that you’d enjoy darkroom work:

•You’re an extrovert and spend much of your day extroverting by talking to clients or teaching classes. Even extroverts need periods of quietness and solitude!

•You spend much of your day dealing with concepts rather than concrete things. My role as a mineral exploration geologist has me in an imaginary, albeit real-in-the-past, world of concepts. Perhaps you’re a designer having to imagine your outcomes for long periods, or a mathematician engaged in statistical analysis and imagining your different populations. Darkroom printmaking is a refreshingly, satisfyingly, concrete operation that’s full of touch.

•You are a busy, on-the-go person whose head keeps thinking of things-to-do, yet you desire to be creative. Your creative insights tend to be restricted to moments of automatic pilot mode, such as when taking a shower. For such a person, a darkroom will be strange at first, but will increasingly become appreciated as a welcome shield from the distractions. Many of us are addicted to hyperactivity and multi-tasking that stifles reflective creativity.

"In a break from my profession a few years ago I taught high school science. The principal introduced a Friday afternoon 'interests' session, with classes in digital and darkroom photography, robotics and cooking. I was asked to run the darkroom course. I’d never actually done B&W darkroom before, although I had briefly taught myself Cibachrome colour printing back in the mid 1980s. So I downloaded the Ilford data sheets and quickly taught myself how to develop B&W film and expose a print, and passed that onto the two classes I ran. After a few weeks, I had kids from the digital photography class coming over, take an interest in what we were doing and want to transfer, complaining 'All we get to do is Photoshop on the computer.'

"Here in Sydney I’ve just completed an 'expressive print' course through Point Light Galley. Despite being a busy extrovert, I really enjoyed it. My first re-discovery was that making the pilot print is easy and fast to achieve. Given a negative with good exposure, it may be entirely satisfactory. The course broke through some of the arcane language I’d be reading about for years in forums and articles. I learned the half-dozen ways of teasing detail and luminosity out of the shadows and highlights for more challenging negatives or exhibition prints. The results were easily repeated and controllable. I think more people might find a new part of themselves if only they had the chance to experience it for themselves."

Mike adds: I like Paul's joke, but Rod's point about the pilot print being easy and fast if the negative is good is important too—and believe it or not, both reflect the way I used to teach photography. My beginning classes would go into the darkroom on the very first day and make prints, from "perfect" negatives I'd made myself beforehand. Not only did we get right to the payoff of watching the prints come up in the developer, but more subtly I was laying the groundwork for them to understand that making great prints is easy if the negative is good. Not once did a new class fail to leave that first day charged with excitement and full of enthusiasm.

Darkroom Isn't Dead, Part LXXXIX

I don't know about you, but sometimes I follow interesting auctions on eBay just to find out what will happen. So look what just sold for a respectable $3,000:

(Note: the link won't be permanent.)

The Apo-El 105 is one of the very few true apochromats available to photographers, and one of the few fully diffraction-limited lenses money can buy. It's arguably the very best enlarging lens for medium format to 6x6, especially if you're working in color, and no slouch for 35mm, either. (Rumor has it that Uncle Arthur K. has one of these cast in lucite on his desk. I've never seen a picture to prove it, though, and the Old Aviator has been known to pull a leg or two.) Somewhere, some darkroom worker is rejoicing over the acquisition of a treasure.

Chances are Ctein will have an interesting comment on this post. If he chimes in, I'll post it.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Roger: "Don't forget that Art also proclaimed that his 105 would be buried with him. I suspect that he meant it...."

Featured Comment by Arthur Kramer: "I'm not dead yet. In fact my entire WW II crew of the B-26 Willie the Wolf are all gone now. I am the last man standing of that brave crew."

Art Kramer
344th Bomb Group
Bombardier on B-26 Willie the Wolf
England France Belgium Holland Italy Germany

Mike replies: Hi Arthur! So what about that lens...do you really have one cast in lucite? I should remember, but it's been a long time since those days on CompuServe.

Art Kramer standing by Willie the Wolf, from his website.
It was the 344th that led the 9th Air Force into battle on D-Day.

Featured Comment by Walter Dufresne: "My top five most vivid pictorial memories from a quarter century ago include focusing oil-mounted Kodachrome transparencies—including Helen Levitt's—in Frank Tartaro's dye transfer shop in New York City. Frank used Apo El Nikkors in several focal lengths. Studying the projected transparency through a high-resolution grain focuser was thrilling. Thank you, Frank, Helen, and Nikon."