Back in May last year my wife Renata and I made a very short trip over to Cambridge, England for a reunion. It was a celebration for her Post Doctoral Supervisor’s 60’th birthday and 80th Grad student. While she spent a beautiful Saturday in the old Chemistry building getting her science geek on, I spent the day wandering around the town visiting the colleges that had captivated me when we lived there 20 years ago. Upon return I downloaded my images and promptly moved on to the next work or photography project and forgot about the Cambridge pics. Back in the day, when I shot film, this never would have happened. After every roll of film I would rush into the darkroom and spend hours developing and printing.
When I recently opened up my folder of images from that trip to Cambridge and began to process them in Lightroom, it really began to dawn on me that the post I do now in the digital darkroom is no different than I did in the chemical darkroom 20 years ago. I would choose an image; do test strips to determine exposure; choose a paper and determine the amount of contrast to apply to it; make a test print; Dry it; decide where I would apply dodging and burning to enhance the image and improve on the impact; and then make about 4 or 5 prints trying to make the best print I could. This whole process would take hours. Sure, I spend much less time per image in the digital darkroom, but the process of selecting and working on images is much the same. Working on these images from Cambridge flooded my mind with memories of our time living in England, and of my hours in the darkroom. I do remember that on a days outing with film I would be really happy if I shot a couple of rolls of 120 during the day and if I got one good print out of it. I think that on this last trip I came away with more keepers than I ever did with film, and I have realized that I am as happy in the digital darkroom as I ever was in the chemical one, and I am most happy wandering around with a camera in hand.
