A Lifelong Hobby Rekindled
Don’t ask me why, but… Now that we’ve been firmly entrenched in digital imaging for many years, I’ve taken up shooting film again and even set up a darkroom once more. I have a Nikon F4s, which in my mind (and many pro photographers will concur) is one of the best 35mm cameras in the world. Now if I only had the money to buy a few more lenses… Maybe I’ll treat myself when I get my tax return.
Yeah, strange working in the darkroom. I haven’t done it in almost 20 years. I was working in a commercial darkroom back in the late 80’s and I haven’t had my home darkroom in operation for probably almost 30 years. I still have the enlarger I got for Christmas when I was around 14, so that’s 32 years ago! But I’m actually using a much nicer Omega enlarger I bought at a tag sale and had been sitting in the attic unused for 10 years.
I grabbed all my old photography books I had in storage, bought a couple newer ones from alibris.com and did a little homework in my spare time. Nothing much has changed, they have new films using a different technology, but I have been shooting conventional “old school” B&W films like Kodak Tri-X and Ilford HP5-plus.
Danny and I (he’s almost as tall as me so we don’t call him little Danny anymore) went down to B&H photo on 34th and 9th. If you have never been and have any interest in A/V equipment, you simply must go! They have absolutely everything and anything related to Photography and Video production. And the overhead trolley system that transports bins of purchased items from the many departments to the checkout area is really cool. Bring your camera and you can try practically any lens made on it and have a look-see.
We bought paper (Ilford nowadays, Kodak, although they still make chemicals, no longer produces B&W paper), paper developer, another safelight, and some odds and ends. Then we came home, mixed up the paper soup, and started printing negs from a few rolls I had shot in the previous few weeks. I must say it was lots of fun. Like always, time seems to stand still in the darkroom, and before you know it I’d been in there for over 6 hours! I ended up with about 9 or 10 good negatives from the 3 rolls of film I had shot and developed, which I find about average.
I took some shots of the Croton river and was trying for the “cottony” effect you get with long exposures and flowing water, but even on an overcast day with the lens stopped all the way down, I was still getting 15th or 30th seconds shutter speeds, too fast to make that effect work. But I found a genuine Nikon neutral density for only 19 bucks on ebay and it got here in 2 days with free shipping, so I’m gonna give it another go at another spot tomorrow.
For some reason I’ve always enjoyed B&W photography much more. Learning to see and think in terms of tonal range without the visual noise of color has been almost second nature for me for almost as long as I can remember. We only have consumer grade digital cameras at home, so I’ve never even tried B&W with digital, I hear it’s nowhere near as good as film though. I’d love to have a good digital camera and a couple lenses for it, but I just don’t have the time or money now, so I’m going to continue to develop (no pun intended) my skills with conventional silver based imaging.
OK, enough from me, if you’re into photography, hope this brought back some memories, if not, you must be bored!
