Darkroom Musings I

Winter and lock-down in Austria were severely impacting my picture taking endeavors, so it was only natural to fire up the darkroom.

I did not print for two months, which means I had a lot of negatives to choose from.

Usually I print 6 motives during a session, but thanks to a strangely busy week my workflow was slower than usual.

Probably fueled by winter melancholy, it came to my mind that during a photographer’s lifetime, there are only so many pictures one can take and print.

ILFORD FB paper and some notes. This is real analogue picture making.

We tend to forget that in times of digital photography, where it is very easy and not very time consuming to take an image. Nonetheless, these images end up on our drives and we all know what happens next: Probably a post to Instagram or the online portfolio and that is it. The time spent on editing in front of a computer screen almost never leads to a real print.

The number of analogue prints a photographer can create during his lifetime is far smaller than the digital photographs he can accumulate on his hard drive.

It is this time analogue printing takes that gets you thinking about your work.

This is why I encourage everyone to shoot film from time to time and print in the darkroom.

Prints make great gifts and giveaways for special clients, by the way.

Darkroom prints are real.