What is a better term than "Hybrid Darkroom?"

[David A. Goldfarb]

My understanding is that the connection between DPUG and APUG will be through the back end--easy login and switching between the two forums, but not a unified forum where digital content would appear in the "New Posts" view on APUG.

We tried a hybrid forum as an opt-in section of APUG before DPUG was established, and it didn't work. There was too much digital spillover from the hybrid area into the analogue forums to stick to APUG's charter of keeping APUG as an information-dense site for analogue photography.

From the point of view of the charter, it doesn't matter what individuals do, or what most people are doing in the field of photography, or what techniques are easier or better. APUG is the place to discuss analogue photography, and digital photography is off topic. If someone wants to learn how to do unsharp masking with pin-registered masks and layers of acetate, this is the place, and one shouldn't have to wade through threads about digital post-production to find that information. If someone wants to know how to thin down a hotspot on a neg with an X-acto knife, that information should be on APUG, and likewise, one shouldn't have to sort through discussions of the healing brush tool or highlight burn tool to find it. If someone wants to make enlarged negatives for alt-processes using ortho film, that should be on APUG, and it doesn't matter if "the interneg is not the final product" or "hardly anyone does it that way anymore." Digital and hybrid digital photography are off-topic for APUG, but very much welcome on DPUG.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Kinda ties into what I was hinting at. Big name portrait photographers were not only excellent businessmen, but tended to develop an assembly line attitude toward production. Camera assistant had to do things exactly their way, according to their signature style, then there
would be a staff retoucher for negs prior to printing, and prints afterwards. It's remarkable how efficient a smudge of pencil or swish of red
neg dye could be for routine tasks like blending out complexion blemishes or creating of curl of stylish cigarette smoke without that damn
stuff ever actually existing on the set to spoil the lighting and focus. In certain application, those old school techniques are actually faster and
easier than modern PS equivalents (though not in things like photocomping). I think it was Matthew Brady who first thought of commercial
photography as a production line thing; many of his Civil War images were taken by trained assistants, not by him - he was basically the
choreographer of a business enterprise. Even successful local portrait studios trained assistants in their signature look and had them doing
a lot of the actual photography, EXACTLY their specified way. I almost cracked up here a couple weeks ago. A big manufacturer whose
products we distribute sent in two full vans of camera gear and with maybe ten people to handle the lighting, shoot, etc. We weren't paying
for it, so I kept my mouth shut. But I could have done it alone, or possibly with one assistant, in a tenth the time, and done it better.

 

[removed account4]

I think it was Matthew Brady who first thought of commercial photography as a production line thing

it isn't exactly the same as you were thinking but in daguerreotype studios it was very often a production / assembly line thing

 

[DREW WILEY]

I don't do much portrait work now and used to do it only on request, usually for some print collector who liked my work and wanted me to
photograph some relative and print it myself. I charged for the framed print, not the job, just like any other so-called fine art print. But there
was something about the 8x10 that just worked in the way people cooperated, besides the technical advantage of a big negative per se. Maybe professional model are different in that respect; but I could bag regular folks with one shutter click, one piece of film. Of course, I wasn't exactly stupid about it, so had either a 6x7 or 35mm SLR nearby, equipped with a similar angle of view and "look" of lens, and appropriately similar film relative to format, just in case something didn't go right with the big camera strategy. And sometimes outdoors,
if there were distractions around, the smaller gear was more appropriate. In the darkroom, I could make any of them into lovely framed
prints. But looking back, the handful of really classic shots were all 8x10's. When one of those is facing the shooter, they know you mean
business and take the shoot seriously themselves. So psychology enters into the equation, not just technique. Same goes in the field. If
someone came by interesting and I wanted to take their portrait, the 8x10 would make all the difference in the world, and has. Look at
what Meyerowitz did with one. If it was a DLSR, they'd think you were either intrusive or it wanted some silly "selfie" look. That's around here. Inland, set up a tripod and they think you're a government spy.

 

[Photo Engineer]

The discussion about format size affecting the time it takes to setup and take a picture gave me a laugh.

In the case of studio lighting, the time is the same. Same lights and tripod. Same room or whatever. A sheet film camera with a film pack or a pair of RZ backs, or a 35mm camera - oops, no extra backs, gotta reload or have a 2nd camera for lots of shoots. So, I have or have supervised portraits being taken of lines of people outside the studio and them coming in and getting their portraits taken one by one! Click, click and format independent except when we had to change over to a new preloaded 35mm back.

Outside, in available light, we shot again with 12 packs in the 4x5 and 36 exposure in 35mm. I carried up to 5 packs in my clothes and one in the Speed Graphic and one 35mm with a 36 exposure roll. I got more 4x5s than 35s. When we used flash, we stuffed our pockets with bulbs. No electronic flash back then. And you shot as fast as you could when the action took place. Click click.

Now, IDK how we did it, but we also switched cameras from 4x5 to 35mm and lost little continuity when there was outdoor action. This included explosions, plane crashes and just plain fast action routine.

Once you learn, you can do your job regardless of format. And you can do it well and quickly!

PE

 

[Dinesh]

But I could have done it alone, or possibly with one assistant, in a tenth the time, and done it better.

Didn't see that one coming.

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

Once you learn, you can do your job regardless of format. And you can do it well and quickly!

Well, I wasn't exactly referring to striving to maximize one's photographic output as part of a personal performance metric in a job. That's how companies measure productivity, and allow them to decide whether or not to fire your ass and hire someone else who will produce more output than you, but for less money.

If the best that can be said about photography is that its practitioners have all been reduced to simple carbon-based photographic resource allocation units, each of them running full time at 120% of design capacity until they explode, the pieces are swept away, and they are replaced by another unit, then sorry, I'm not interested. Counting how many bodies per hour can be paraded in front of a lens holds no magic for me.

Photography is where I go to get away from that dehumanizing sort of crap. Not to seek it out. I liked taking 30 minutes in the early morning today. It was both relaxing and refreshing. It was quiet. It gave me a chance to think my own thoughts for a change. And it made the rest of the 120% day at my real job more tolerable.

Ken

 

[Photo Engineer]

Well, I wasn't exactly referring to striving to maximize one's photographic output as part of a personal performance metric in a job. That's how companies measure productivity, and allow them to decide whether or not to fire your ass and hire someone else who will produce more output than you, but for less money.

If the best that can be said about photography is that its practitioners have all been reduced to simple carbon-based photographic resource allocation units, each of them running full time at 120% of design capacity until they explode, the pieces are swept away, and they are replaced by another unit, then sorry, I'm not interested. Counting how many bodies per hour can be paraded in front of a lens holds no magic for me.

Photography is where I go to get away from that dehumanizing sort of crap. Not to seek it out. I liked taking 30 minutes in the early morning today. It was both relaxing and refreshing. It was quiet. It gave me a chance to think my own thoughts for a change. And it made the rest of the 120% day at my real job more tolerable.

Ken

When you are doing journalistic photography or the like, maximizing output is not a true personal performance metric. It appears that you have never done much beyond static photography Ken.

PE

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

Maximizing output is a much broader term than your use of it indicates. Value generated comes in many forms, only sometimes measured in raw quantity.

And as I've said many times, film photography is an avocation for me, not a vocation. I learned long ago the wisdom of never mixing the two.

Although at one point for several years between major technical careers I did work as the head of a small commercial darkroom, doing student work from the local art college, evidentiary photographs for the local police department, short-notice b&w processing for a photojournalist who was a stringer for the Orange County Register newspaper*, printing and restoration work for heirloom negatives** and glass plate negatives***, Cibachrome prints from transparencies, and even paper sample inserts for technical photo publications.

That said, in pursuit of my avocation I have also spent many, many games in the first and third base photographer wells at Anaheim Stadium (California Angels), under the baskets at the L.A. Sports Arena (USC basketball), at Pauley Pavilion (UCLA basketball, back when John Wooden was winning his championships), and other Southern California collegiate and professional sports venues.

I attended all of these events under fully accredited photo press credentials from the San Pedro News Pilot newspaper (now defunct). None of these locations were anywhere near Yosemite.

Finally, most of the Nikon camera equipment I still own and use, and almost all of my major darkroom equipment, were paid for by doing weddings while I worked at Disneyland during my undergraduate years at USC. A captive audience of 7,500+ fellow employees made up entirely of young people of marrying age. I lost track of how many I did. And I well learned the working definition of bridezilla and how to deal with it, and its mother, and sisters, and everyone else.

So not just static photography, no. Things in life are rarely as they seem on the surface...



Ken

* Mixed a new set of processing chemistry daily, keeping it at 68F and ready to go on a moment's notice. He would stop and phone (no cell phones back then) while on his way over. Alcohol for the final rinse is a wonderful desiccant. The OC Register eventually became a Pulitzer Prize-winning publication.

** Worked closely on these restorations with a very talented young lady who was an airbrush artist. This was way before the days of Photoshop, when retouching (and reconstruction) was truly an art in itself. My job was simply to give her the base image she needed. Any magic that resulted after that was entirely her talented doing.

*** Have you seen the (there was a url link here which no longer exists) in my gallery yet? Take a look, they're really cool. Especially if you like vintage photographs of vintage airplanes and automobiles. Check out the 3-seat Lincoln-Page LP-3 biplane (plate #1) and the Auburn 8-88 roadster (plate #3). These prints are from my darkroom days.

 

[removed account4]

The discussion about format size affecting the time it takes to setup and take a picture gave me a laugh.

In the case of studio lighting, the time is the same. Same lights and tripod. Same room or whatever. A sheet film camera with a film pack or a pair of RZ backs, or a 35mm camera - oops, no extra backs, gotta reload or have a 2nd camera for lots of shoots. So, I have or have supervised portraits being taken of lines of people outside the studio and them coming in and getting their portraits taken one by one! Click, click and format independent except when we had to change over to a new preloaded 35mm back.

Outside, in available light, we shot again with 12 packs in the 4x5 and 36 exposure in 35mm. I carried up to 5 packs in my clothes and one in the Speed Graphic and one 35mm with a 36 exposure roll. I got more 4x5s than 35s. When we used flash, we stuffed our pockets with bulbs. No electronic flash back then. And you shot as fast as you could when the action took place. Click click.

Now, IDK how we did it, but we also switched cameras from 4x5 to 35mm and lost little continuity when there was outdoor action. This included explosions, plane crashes and just plain fast action routine.

Once you learn, you can do your job regardless of format. And you can do it well and quickly!

PE

love reading stuff like this !

thanks PE !
- john

 

[Photo Engineer]

I have mixed my vocation and avocation all my life and it does get tiresome when there is no effective time off. OTOH, I have a few hobbies and if one looks in from the outside, my hobby is hobbies!

Yes, you can mix the two and have fun. During the day, I have coated new paper or film types, or mixed up new process solutions and at night I have used them to make pictures. I had fun all day long!

I used the film to take pictures of my models. I used paper that I coated to make prints of my family, and I processed the paper in my own mix of developer and blix. Next day at work, I presented results. One person claimed that was cheating, but he meant it as a joke. We did get a good laugh out of it.

PE

 

[removed account4]

I have mixed my vocation and avocation all my life and it does get tiresome when there is no effective time off. OTOH, I have a few hobbies and if one looks in from the outside, my hobby is hobbies!

Yes, you can mix the two and have fun. During the day, I have coated new paper or film types, or mixed up new process solutions and at night I have used them to make pictures. I had fun all day long!

I used the film to take pictures of my models. I used paper that I coated to make prints of my family, and I processed the paper in my own mix of developer and blix. Next day at work, I presented results. One person claimed that was cheating, but he meant it as a joke. We did get a good laugh out of it.

PE

doesn't sound like cheating to me, sounds like fun

john

 

[Bill Burk]

I attended all of these events under fully accredited photo press credentials from the San Pedro News Pilot.

I didn't know you worked for the news pile.

 

[Bill Burk]

Ken, I went to high school in San Pedro, that's what we used to call the paper.

p.s. Sometimes you have to explain yourself. In another context, I felt it was necessary to postscript a message to explain that I'm a lens user.

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

I have mixed my vocation and avocation all my life and it does get tiresome when there is no effective time off.

Yeah, at times I've questioned the common wisdom which says the best thing in the world is to have a job doing what one loves. How lucky that person must be to get paid for doing something they would secretly do for nothing. Right?

But... what then would someone like that do for relaxation? To get away from the stress of their job? Go back to work for free each weekend and holiday?

If one is doing sometime and being paid by someone else for it, they may still enjoy doing it. But it's no longer theirs. They don't own it. They are playing with house money. OPM.* And that, I think, changes everything.

The owner of the darkroom business who hired me started that business because he loved photography. But because his avocation then became his vocation, he no longer had the time to practice it for his own enjoyment. He could only practice it for others. And for himself, but for reasons (putting food on the table) other than his pure enjoyment of it.

He hired me to help out because he no longer had time to do the darkroom part himself. One day when it was slow I took an afternoon and cleaned out the entire darkroom. Washed the walls and floor. Cleaned equipment. Removed sink stains. Reorganized the gazillions of different photo products. Fixed a couple of broken equipment items. A very productive day.

When he saw what I had done, Ed was furious. He never directly criticized my efforts. But he was mad. It took me quite a while to realize what had happened. By me cleaning and reorganizing, I had taken possession of his last sense of ownership of the thing that he originally loved doing, before that thing stopped being a avocation and became an vocation.

He had still maintained the hope that, "If I can just get through these last business tasks, then I can get back into the darkroom and do what I love doing." But when I reworked everything into my own image, he lost that hope. It was no longer his. It was mine. In essence, no longer would I need to ask Ed where he kept something. Instead he would need to come and ask me where I kept something. A huge sea change.

So there is danger in allowing that line between avocation and vocation to drift too far in favor of using one's hobby to make money. Best, I think, to keep them completely separate.

Ken

* Danny DiVito in Other People's Money.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Ken, I have enjoyed every year of my life in photography as both a vocation and avocation. It was fun.

PE

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

I didn't know you worked for the news pile.

Ken, I went to high school in San Pedro, that's what we used to call the paper.

p.s. Sometimes you have to explain yourself. In another context, I felt it was necessary to postscript a message to explain that I'm a lens user.

I wasn't a journalist. That's why I said "in pursuit of my avocation..."

My supervisor at Disneyland was an ex-collegiate basketball player and knew a sports photojournalist at the newspaper. Through him that PJ would pass along the event credentials so that I could practice my avocation from much better vantage points than the average guy with a camera and telephoto lens up in row 30 of the arena. The original point being, sports photography is not static photography.

The newspaper in question was this one. In the mid-1980s we all still called it the San Pedro News Pilot, even though it's name apparently formally changed to just the News-Pilot in 1965. Last I heard from someone it was defunct as a pulp daily, but survived as an online publication. Not sure if it's still around today.

(For reference, I was born in Hollywood, grew up in Norwalk where I attended Excelsior HS, and lived in Anaheim only two blocks from DL before moving to Washington State in 1989.)

Ken

 

[Dinesh]

..........When he saw what I had done, Ed was furious. He never directly criticized my efforts. But he was mad. It took me quite a while to realize what had happened. By me cleaning and reorganizing, I had taken possession of his last sense of ownership of the thing that he originally loved doing, before that thing stopped being a avocation and became an vocation.

He had still maintained the hope that, "If I can just get through these last business tasks, then I can get back into the darkroom and do what I love doing." But when I reworked everything into my own image, he lost that hope. It was no longer his. It was mine.

Interesting. Do you think Sean feels this way when you defend the "no digital" stance or when I rant about people not subscribing?

 

[Sirius Glass]

Ken, I have enjoyed every year of my life in photography as both a vocation and avocation. It was fun.

PE

HEY!! Please keep the last sentence in the present tense!

 

[RalphLambrecht]

I use digital capture but still enjoy a FB print.Hence,I make digital negatives from from the manipulated files for contact printing in the darkroom.That's hybrid processing for me.Scanning negatives, I call dinosaur digital.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I use digital capture but still enjoy a FB print.Hence,I make digital negatives from from the manipulated files for contact printing in the darkroom.That's hybrid processing for me.Scanning negatives, I call dinosaur digital.

The point is that while you use digital techniques you do not jamb that part down our throats on APUG, rather you talk about the analog part of your work. Some others were breast fed on demand and they have not matured past that stage, hence they purposely post digital content and then throw a temper tantrum when someone calls them on their immature behavior.

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

Interesting. Do you think Sean feels this way when you defend the "no digital" stance or when I rant about people not subscribing?

Damn insightful question, Dinesh. And I don't know the answer.

Except perhaps to infer from his own (there was a url link here which no longer exists) on the same subject, along with (there was a url link here which no longer exists) by the moderation team who together constitute a collective proxy voice, that my position directly aligns with his. In the case of Ed I had no way of knowing that my actions, while laudable on the surface, were in fact in direct opposition to his position. I'm less informed regarding subscription rants.

Had Ed informed me in advance never to clean up his darkroom, I would not have.

Had the posts above informed me in advance not to defend a "no digital" stance, I would not have.

Ken

[Edit: And thanks for the distinction between "no digital" and "anti-digital". Appreciated...]

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

Generally, we'd like to discourage ranting of all sorts, because it doesn't contribute to a good forum atmosphere.

We'd like people to avoid digital posts, but we'd rather that users just report digital content and not rant against it in the forum.

Likewise, we'd like people to subscribe, but we don't want individual users pressuring other users to subscribe, because it detracts from the forum ethos.

 

[MattKing]

I think Sean would be more upset if we reprogrammed the software he is using without being asked.

He would be especially unhappy if I did that, because any change would probably be so destructive (due to ineptitude and ignorance) as to cause no end of trouble.

Based on a few brief electronic exchanges I have had with Sean, it seem to me that he both enjoys and gets frustrated with some of our (sometimes misguided) efforts.

And that he is not unwilling to have some behind the scene fun with them too.

 

[ozphoto]

I am thinking that I go to APUG and can click on the forums I want to see and unclick the others... kinda like I have never opened the soapbox , or lounge.

That's how I'm hoping it can be combined - can see both but block the stuff you don't want to see. Already do this with several topics on APUG; blocked for so long, that I actually I forget they're even there (that is, until I use the mobile version and then it lists them all: *extremely* annoying as it fills the screen with each an every forum before I can even get to the new posts!!)

Integrated silently with an "Opt-In" function when the site is relaunched, could be a great way to add some traffic and interest to DPUG.

Seamless swapping between the two sounds wonderful.