Here is a snapshot of my friend, Jim Steele cursing at his printer because the paper did not feed correctly; necessitating approximately 20 more seconds to re-feed the paper! Has technology turned us into a bunch of impatient dolts or what! We both had a good chuckle after discussing how we used to work not so long ago ... are we spoiled!
Old school ... after shooting we would have to go into the darkroom and process (soup) the film, wait for it to dry and then make contact sheets ... expose the paper, submerge in developer for about 2 minutes, 30 seconds in the stop-bath and on to the fixer for another 1-3 minutes. From there, on to the wash for 30 minutes to 1 hour and off to the drying rack for several hours, or in some cases a heated print dryer that quickly fried your prints for 5 minutes until dry ... love those little yellow stains on the print and fixer stains on the apron of the print dryer! Better yet, use RC paper ... it develops quickly and drys fast. Thank goodness for instant gratification in the darkroom!
After making a selection of what negatives to print, you had to make sure you had fresh chemicals. If not, you had to mix some new chemistry. If you were out of developer, you had to mix developer in hot water and wait for it to cool down or use bags of ice to help cool the chemistry to 68 - 70 degrees.
The next step was to clean the negative and insert it in the enlarger, crop, focus and expose a piece of photographic paper to make a test print. After arriving at the correct exposure and proper filtration for contrast, it was time to make the final print. This might take several hours or in my case an entire day working with a difficult negative.
After developing, stopping and fixing the final print it was off to a rinse in Perma Wash to help remove residual fixer before being washed in a print-washer for an hour. With the conclusion of washing the prints, it was time to selenium or sepia tone ... and then back to a final rinse for another 30 minutes to an hour. Oh, forgot to mention that you hopefully made a few extra prints, because somewhere during the washing process a wet print would get dinged, scratched or destroyed in some way or another. What fun!
Once the prints were dry, which took several hours, it was time to spot out the dust marks and dry- mount the print for final presentation ... a labor or love or a pain-in-the-ass! It took a lot time and a lot of patients. What used to take many hours or even days, can now take a fraction of that time ... thanks to technology.
While technology has allowed us to speed up the entire picture-making process, there are many of us who still spend hours editing a single image in PhotoShop. There is still a group of individuals that profess that the hand-made gelatin silver print is "better" than a digital print. I would not say "better," I would say "different" ... two totally different mediums ... it's like the difference between chocolate and vanilla!
"Different" is the quintessential word to use! To quote Brooks Jensen of LensWork Magazine; "There is nothing creative about mixing chemicals!". I suppose, you could find a lot of other steps in the process that also disrupt the creative process. That said, with digital, we now have more "options" to choose from; more "creative paths" we could take and review quickly and then, once we've spent several hours in Photoshop working on a look, we can save that look and add it to another image in a click. We're still spending a long time on each image but I think, it's to our benefit that we have more "what if's" that we can explore, review and, follow another path. Isn’t that great? What else could we want? Well, I’ll tell you; knowing when to stop. How do you know when to stop?
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