Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part II
You probably remember Part I, from a week ago Saturday. You might want to go back and re-read that before diving into this part. First, to reiterate: no B&W film photographer needs to practice sensitometry. It's absolutely not necessary for...
Comment o’ the Week: Good Ol’ Days
From Dogman: Among the wonderful memories of doing daily newspaper photography in the '70s & '80s was the hurried darkroom work. NOT! You have never lived a full life until you have faced an 80-mile round trip night sports assignment...
Analog Photography, Dept.: New Age, Same Old Disease
It's around again. Never went away, actually. It can't be eradicated. Suppress it here, it pops up over there. A dread disease that wantonly wastes time and ruins photographic work. I'm talking about pushing disease. Even having to write it...
Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part I
Backing up a bit from yesterday, I acknowledge that a number of people were mystified as to, well, what the heck I was talking about. A densitometer, more specifically a transmission densitometer, is simply a device for measuring densities—usually, for...
Densitometers for Large-Format B&W Photography
When I took the helm at Photo Techniques magazine in 1994, the outgoing Editor, David Alan Jay, told me that the three things readers most needed to "fully participate in the life of the magazine" were a large format camera,...
Random Excellence: The Lazy Aussie
The Lazy Aussie (Andrew McDonald), Falls "I've just taken my first film shot for at least a decade, dragging the ole 1965 Autocord twinlens [TLR] from a damp shed. It works perfectly! I really never thought I'd shoot film again,"...
Fixer Doesn’t Sink
By Ctein Here's a coincidence. When Mike wrote his column about the craft of black-and-white darkroom printing two weeks ago, to the applause of film photographers who felt they were becoming depraved on account of being deprived, I was already...
L.F. Deardorff and Sons Rekindled
For large-format photographers, the name "Deardorff" has some of the same luminosity that the name "Leica" has for small-format photographers. Think of it as the Harley-Davidson of cameras. Will Whitaker, himself a large format man of sterling reputation, tells me...
Classic Printmaking for Fun, Part I
Waukesha*, Wisconsin, June 2011 — I'm 54 this year, and film photography has certainly come a long way since I first seriously caught the photography bug in 1980. It used to be all there was. Up until the 1990s, the...
Minority Report
By Ctein Amidst the discussions a few weeks back of film and digital photographic practices, it occurred to me that it's much harder for me to get numbers today on the kinds of photographs photographers are making than it used...
Vexed by fb+f
There are some issues that cause in photography enthusiasts what in the past I've called "angst." That's just the German word for "fear," and it has different connotations in English than it does in German, as far as I can...
Video: Paul Trevor
Photo by Paul Trevor Here's a nice video by the English photographer Paul Trevor about some old work of his that's just been coming into its own within the past couple of years. It's also quite pertinent to the discussion(s)...
