How digital ruined the party

Before you get all huffy, let me just make the disclaimer that this is not a digital bashing post. A more suitable title would have been "How combining film with digital without knowing the limits of the traditional media while simultaneously not realizing the the latitude of digital media ruined the party.", but that would be pathetically long, and its kind of fun to make someone think I'm going to harass digital, and then not do it. This is just a real life account of how mixing media blindly can ruin things down the road, based on my own experiences.

I had only switched to 4x5 for about four months before I lost the darkroom access I had at the time. To fill the void of being darkroom less, I purchased an Epson Perfection 2450 scanner that can handle the 4x5 negatives I was shooting so I could at least still proof and upload the photographs that I was creating. This method went on from summer 03, to summer 06 and I never had a problem with it, until the end of the summer in 2006.

At that point I had a darkroom set up and got back to making wet prints. However, I wish I had realized previously what I realized when I started wet printing again. That being that just about anything except a grossly underexposed negative can be put into a film scanner, and have all the information read. Thus, learning to identify things like massive over development never happened. If everything was visual on the negative, the scanner would read it just fine, and I was happy enough. However, photo paper isn't that forgiving, and now I'm finding that a lot of what I shot over the past three years was really hard to print traditionally, and dammit! I didn't like it. Doing a contortionist's act of dodging & burning just to get all the print's tones onto the paper before even considering using the same methods for making artistic modifications, was just not fun.

So I decided to take action. I drudged up a copy of Ansel Adam's 'The Negative', and Fred Picker's 'Zone IV Workshop' and read them both. Then I took my Calument shutter tester and charted out all the speeds on all of my shutters. Invested in a Pentax Digital Spotmeter (at a considerable less price then the list price in the provided link) and went to town calibrating my equipment based on the Picker book, and articles at the archived Barry Thornton site.

Before I had ran the calibration gauntlet, I was starting to get real upset with my shooting. I'd go out and shoot for several hours, and be rewarded with about a 10% hit rate on properly exposed & developed negatives. Having this happen several outings in a row was quite demoralizing and costly. Since I've calibrated my equipment, this percentage seems to have gone up considerably. However, since I'm still a few weeks away from having a working darkroom set up again, I can't be 100% sure of my results yet. But I do say, the negatives tend to look way better already. The shadows all have detail, and the highlights don't look bulletproof. I'm eager to see just how much easier it will be to get a solid base print to work with soon. Getting these consistent, usable results has greatly improved the enjoyment of the time time I am spending actually out making negatives, and has put a spark back into me to go out and make more negatives.

That is pretty much the end of my story until I can wet print again to really see if my efforts have payed off. So I guess the moral of the story is Know your equipment. Leave nothing to chance. And don't let digital be a crutch if you are mixing media.