ESCAPE From The Darkroom!: Old-School Principles Applied to Modern Digital Photography

Confused by Digital Cameras? Don't Be! Like many in the Baby Boom, I grew up in a house full of cameras. The post-war prosperity meant that most families could afford to chronicle their own lives. The cameras ranged from antique Kodak Brownies to SLR box cameras and gradually to Instamatics and Polaroids. When I started art school in 1971, Photo 101 included darkroom developing and printing. My "photo editing software" was a dodging stick - a thin rod with variously sized and shaped cardboard forms on the end, held manually between the projector and photo paper to deny light to chosen areas of the print as I counted off seconds. Since I was too broke to afford am upscale SLR, I compensated for my cheap camera's shortcomings with creative darkroom technique. Today, we'd say most of my work was "Photoshopped." However, I soon learned that if I planned the shot properly, I needed less darkroom trickery to get the finished piece I wanted. That planning paid off years later, when I finally did have better hardware. From 2004 to 2007, I taught a series of photography courses at the Ed Tech Training Center in Marion, Kentucky, and shared my approaches to planning each shot, and developing the artistic vision. I was still using the anachronism "film speed," and would be told each time by the students with digital cameras that they did not have film! What they couldn't grasp is that they still had film speed settings (ISO) on their cameras. The manuals I had created for those courses formed a solid instructional core, and were expanded into a full book. Professionals in several states told me they've learned from my lessons. I hope you find this work of value to you as well