Digital Printing

[GregY]

The 1000s of captures is pray and spray and the editing is making. Sounds to me like the opposite of zen art.

another one of reasons why i have stayed with film & i must say my best education was spending more than a decade primarily using large format cameras..... coming back to roll film my itchy trigger finger cured.....

 

[djdister]

Years ago when I got an Epson 3880 I made a digital print from a scan of a favorite 4x5 B&W negative I had previously printed in a darkroom. The digital B&W print was so sharp and had so much more detail in the shadows that I pulled the darkroom print out of the frame and have kept the digital print on the wall for years now. Maybe my black and white printing skills weren't as good as they could be, but a high quality digital printer helped me make so many more quality prints from years of negatives than I ever could have made by thousands of hours in the darkroom. It's been very freeing...

 

[koraks]

{Other Moderator's addition:
@koraks post below reflects a concern shared by many of us respecting a number of responses in this thread.}

It saddens me that there's apparently still people who believe we need to draw crude divisions in the community based on choice of technology. What a silly position to take. And what little justice does it do to the choices others make. There can't be much honor or satisfaction in that. A bleak outlook, for sure.

 

[fgorga]

It saddens me that there's apparently still people who believe we need to draw crude divisions in the community based on choice of technology. What a silly position to take. And what little justice does it do to the choices others make. There can't be much honor or satisfaction in that. A bleak outlook, for sure.

Here... here. I fully agree.

The discussion sounds an awful lot like the pictorial vs. straight photography arguments of a century ago.

It's a big world. Chose your own path and don't make prescriptions for others. There is plenty of room for everyone.

 

[Taylor K Nankervis]

Are you conversant with digital photography (capture), or analogue only?

If you are pursuing the DIY route, then you are looking at a learning curve that could well take 5-6 years of persistent trial and error (and not inconsiderable cost!), quite apart from learning the basics of colour or monochrome printing e.g. up to speed with advanced scanning skills; profiling (screen/print-media); calibration and colourimetrics (colour matching)... the list goes on so long that unrestrained, I could fill 2-3 A4 pages! Don't expect a computer in auto to deliver the results that will light your fire. The 'maker' has complete, overriding control with little interest in automation or short-cuts.

Individual experiences vary. I finished darkroom printing in 1998 (my own initially, then a community darkroom) and have no regrets about the departure from such filthy, stinking, stuffy and dark dens (it certainly did not help my asthma!). Digital cameras were very soon to barnstorm onto the scene, bamboozling an impressionable yet very unskilled public into the bargain, and inkjet printers — frowned upon by uber-traditional practitioners of the craft, went from simply mediocre to, well, bloody marvellous in just a few short years. Darkrooms went from hundreds (private) in the large town where I lived, to just handful (and none are known to this day). As an Ilfochrome Classic printer, the impact of the march of digital photography and printing (aka, full digital workflow) had a very negative affect on the long-standing appreciation of the traditional means of crafting a print (psst — the domain of the 'maker'!) — this high cost, Disneychromed glossy stuff was soon scorned on as backward, romantic crap — certainly, it wasn't seen as art, and nowhere near as cheap, fast and efficient in the public eye as digital.

I think I was lucky to scrape through considering how costly the training was (travel, meals, petrol etc.). I began my scan-to-print skills in the winter of 1993, travelling 320km (return!) to night school, using the earliest version of Photoshop (and PageMaker, then Quark XPress). The training was 12 months; on-job training was another two years and then I returned to darkroom printing as an Ilfochrome Classic printer (also printing digitally to that media from 2004). Digital printing wasn't so much a thing then, but it definitely was making inroads against a growing discord from traditionalists

I do not know what the situation is regarding formal courses or avenues of learning in England, but in Australia, courses do still exist as part of a broader curriculum in commercial art production (e.g. with advertising agencies who sponsor their own training), also dedicated photography studies organisations, although film and scanning has little prominence today to what it once did — most I know of are geared toward full digital production. Are there adult education organisations in the UK that offer courses to introduce one to digital printing?

You need to kit up and put the head down into learning, long-term. None of this 'taker not maker' stuff. You do both, or you do not do it at all.

 

[Taylor K Nankervis]

It saddens me that there's apparently still people who believe we need to draw crude divisions in the community based on choice of technology. What a silly position to take. And what little justice does it do to the choices others make. There can't be much honor or satisfaction in that. A bleak outlook, for sure.

Oh yes, do tell!

There are traditionalists here in Australia who pour scorn on how others involved in the photography craft produce things (prints). I experience it often.

But frankly my dear, I couldn't give a damn.