My intro

Hello one and all, just here to say hi and introduce myself to you.
I have basically been involved in photography all my life.
I starting off in a press agency darkroom printing early resin coated paper and also Bromide stuff too then lucky enough to have had the pleasure of running the same photos round all the old newspaper titles in Fleet Street....the good old days!
After that I did a short time in the darkrooms at Camera Press and the BBC, Camera Press was fantastic being able to print some great Karsh of Ottowa negs.
I moved from there to a small Soho studio printing colour and B&W for some eight years or so before getting a job in the Times and Sun darkrooms pringting again 35mm - 5x4 negs, some of which were nice crystal clear glass plates but alas after a few years the darkroom and other areas were combined into one area called Imaging, I still miss the good old darkroom days very much.
After many years in darkrooms I found myself sitting behind a Mac retouching in Photoshop and have remained so ever since.
Now I have been working with Macs and Photoshop from the very beggining of the new technology some 10 odd years back, so far back that the Macs used to classed as fast with their 500MB hard discs, how things have changed eh!
Now I'm on Photoshop CS2 and nice new G5 Macs for all my retouching work for The Times and Sunday Times, all very different from the good old days of the darkroom life...

Welcome Paul. What a wonderful historical perspective you can provide! I would be very interested to hear more from you about the transition from darkroom to digital — what is lost and what is gained.

Nill
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www.toulme.net

Hi Paul,

My welcome too. We are lucky to have you with all that experience. Do you still have any of those 4x5 glass slides. Would be fun to have a scan of them posted for just show or for reworking in some way!

I still have an Apple IIe stored away and all the discs to go with it!

I used to feel I was at the cutting edge with 64 k of RAM and amazed my kids by making auto-generated art work.

I'd like to know if you still do any B&W albeit from RGB digital files and what preferences you have.

Also does the new M8 spark your appetite?

Asher

Thanks for the warm welcome.

I feel like I have been in photography for ever and I suppose in some ways I have been.

I started back in 1974 I think not sure now but I think and have seen so many things change, some for the better some for the worst I think.

The transition from darkroom to digital was something that I had no choice in if I wanted to keep my job to be honest.

I can't say I have ever seen anything that can match a well made print on any material especially when it comes to B&W, a properly exposed processed negative and a decent hand made print can't be beaten from what I have seen.

I know ink jet printers have improved tremendously over the past few years but they still don't don't have the photographic depth that can only be achieved by a traditionaly printed negative.

I suppose I work in a rather specialist newspaper area but we still get what is considered to be high quailty digital images yet personally I have to say none have ever struck me as bieng as sharp as a negative scan.

The file sizes are normally sufficient to meet the size and resolution required but there is always some sort of .jpg artifact hanging around to spoil the final result when attempting to sharpen the images.

I think most of the blame regards quality lands firmly on the photographer who has more often than not ranged the image on their laptop and compressed the images before sending them to the picture desks envoled, I know it's easy to generalise with my comments but I can only talk from my own experience so I appologize in advance to any photographers who do know what they are doing!

I guess I am a real traditionalist at heart but after having worked both areas of analogue and now digital I still find myself calling on my previous experience in darkrooms.

Virtually 99.9% of my imaging work is with digital files for final use as colour and still many in B&W as well, we range them in colour then switch to B&W making a few more changes before sharpening etc, we also do four colour B&W for pages that are printing colour but required in B&W.

Yes the nice new Leica M8 does take my fancy but alas it's out of my price range at the moment but hey one day I'd like to own one.

Talking of Leica, I have used most of the Leitz Focomats over many years and love them dearly, there was nothing better back then and nothing better today for making fine prints.

Sounds strange to many but I really miss the old smell of the darkroom chemicals, the heady cocktail of old dev and fresh fix that is forever stuck in my mind.

Sorry to ramble on, I go go on all night, it's late and I'd better get to bed!


cheers