Hi guys, I'm a newbie here so I hope you won't mind me diving into this thread.
I'm based in London and am a mature student. Do you have those in the US? It means I'm too old to be a student.
No, it means I'm older than the usual age for a student, though in my case I'm at least old enough to be a mum to anyone in my class. Anyhow, I signed up for a diploma course in ... dare I say it ... digital photography, but then I was set a research assignment, to spend six weeks researching Anton Corbijn.
Why did I sign up for digital, when the same college does a parallel course in film photography?
Well, I used to shoot film. I had two film SLRs - a Pentax ME Super and a Canon EOS 100 - but I never learnt darkroom work back then, and the mainstream labs were already abandoning B&W processing, or charging a lot more for it. When digital became viable, as in the availability of DSLRs with enough megapixels to make decent sized prints, I adopted it because, since I was already an intensive computer user, it would be cheaper than film. By the time I found my course, last summer, I wasn't really getting the film cameras out anymore and had invested so much time in trying to teach myself photoshop, I didn't really envisage wanting to learn a new skill, or spend hours in the dark, slopping chemicals around. However, in my entrance interview for the course, the head of faculty said we would use medium and large format cameras in the studio and process the films, just doing enough to get acquainted with our photographic roots. I liked that idea. Enough to remove any mystery for me. Mysteries bug me and I'd always been just a little bit intrigued about how people processed film and made their own prints, especially knowing so many people did it at home.
Bob Carnie, you might be comforted to know that, here in the UK, there are still plenty of colleges with darkrooms (and wet rooms). I now attend two for different courses.
My research project on Corbijn - well, I wish this forum topic had existed when I was doing that. It would have been fantastic to fill in the gaps in what I was able to find out. I knew he shot with 'blads and printed liths, but I didn't know which paper he used, or whether he did his own printing or had someone do it for him. I read a suggestion that Tim Rudman might have been the man who taught Corbijn about lith and got him hooked. Martin Reed, do you know if that's true?
Neither my local nor college libraries had any Corbijn books and there were no exhibitions in the UK. I really wanted to see his prints in the flesh, as it were. Books would only contain reproductions, but they'd still give me a better feel than seeing them on the web, especially when you don't know who scanned them or how well/poorly. Friends came to the rescue and interrogated their university arts libraries. I ended up getting my hands on four books: Start Trax and Famouz, and the Stern Spezial Photografie supplement. I was hooked. And frustrated. And annoyed with myself.
I used to go to so many gigs in my youth, and never thought to take a camera. It might have been easier to get one in than it is now. If I'd had the ability, back then, to think outside the box a bit more, I might have gone down the rock photography route. (Corbijn doesn't like being called a rock photographer, by the way. He finds it insulting. He regards himself as a photographer who happens to photograph a lot of musicians.)
So, having printed one photogram and one actual photograph in the college darkroom, I took the darkroom technician aside and asked him if he could secretly help me to make a lith print - even if it wasn't very good - to surprise my tutor, because she had specifically asked me to research "a particular technique" that Corbijn is known for. I couldn't think of a more thorough way to research it than by having a go! The tech didn't even think about it. Just said no, it's too complicated, too difficult, you're not ready for that yet. Deflating? I accepted it as fair comment, but as I have access to darkrooms for hire in a club where I'm a member, I thought, "Stuff you, matey - I'll do it without you."
I started reading about lith printing on forums and in a book I found in the UK's famous Mr Cad shop in Croydon. I reckon I spend more time there than in the supermarket now.
I realised it was not a beginner's process, but then I found a link to Tim Rudman's site and saw that he runs workshops. So I signed up for a three day lith printing workshop in April and I can hardly wait.
Knowing this, my tutor told me she'd been asked to teach a darkroom course at an adult education centre on the other side of London, and asked if I'd be interested in enrolling. Two hours on Tuesday evenings for 10 weeks, and at a reasonable price to include all chemicals and disposable aprons. You just had to bring your own films, gloves and paper.
I'm so hooked on film, I bought a Bronica ETR outfit with three lenses, three backs, prism viewfinder and speed grip.
If anyone's interested in my darkroom adventures to date, I blogged about it at
http://avriljones.wordpress.com. Feel free to tell me if I got anything wrong, and chuckle at how much I have yet to learn.
Cheers,
Avril
Consequently not really worth bringing coals back to Newcastle. It's a tragedy that the original factory foundered, but as with Forte it seems every financial avenue had been sounded out. It's also possible that the original Seagull emulsion was becoming an environmental liability, which might have been linked to the demise.
