Analog to analog to digital
My delayed gratification photography project birthed a binder of negatives longing for a darkroom. To start I took the Intro to Black and White Printing — Darkroom course at the oh-so-incredible-that-such-an-awesome-resource-is-walking-distance-from-where-I-live Harvey Milk Photography Center last fall.
I hoped I’d go back after the course to actually print some of these photos (as opposed to the ones we shot and developed specifically for the class)—I even bought my own paper—but I never got around to it. So when I discovered last week that the second level darkroom course was about to begin, I jumped. (Sometimes it helps to have a little external motivation.)
Tuesday night was the first class, and I printed the first photo from “my analog year” (Rondel Place, from A study of power lines). We experimented with a technique called split filtering, in order to expose the highlights and shadows of the image separately. Of course, I made a quick and dirty scan of the print to compare and contrast the results here. (Note: The only digital post-processing I did was cropping, desaturating, and resizing.)
