I needed slides of my recent work for a grant application. This required tapping into a set of skills and processes that are rapidly becoming obsolete. There’s the news that Kodak will cease producing black and white paper. Our local lab, Ivey Imaging, got rid of its billing department—all us pros are now on credit card billing. The change is accelerating, but there’s still a need for me to keep a foot in each camp.
Galleries and grants and the like still want slides. For black and white, I know of no way to make a better quality slide than with Tmax100 processed in reversal chemistry. So I took out my near-abandoned film camera, my EOS3, set up lights, and plowed through 7 rolls of film making copies of the previous year’s prints.
Processing film is precise, boring work that is oddly fulfilling to me. I am grateful to still have the capability, and the occasional need, to use my wet lab. I still can’t produce a black and white print digitally that comes anywhere close to the richness and density of a silver print. Or capture the inimicable look of an image shot on black and white film on anything but black and white film. The highlights give it away—they end so abruptly on a digital capture (blink-blink, 255,255,255), but on film they’re creamy and go on forever. Dig deep, and there’s still something to see and feel in those highlights.
Not that I won’t get there eventually. I marvel at the control and reproducibility of digital. But I’m a lousy printmaker in that realm. There’s some key pieces of the workflow that I haven’t mastered yet.
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