Darkroom Techniques Quotes

My father thought photography was done by lowlifes.

A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.

It was amazing to watch him in the darkroom at an advanced age, still get excited when the results were pleasing. He still struggled like we all do in the darkroom and he struggled behind the camera, and when he had a success he was beaming.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

I learned working with the negatives could make for better pictures

I discovered that I could do whatever I wanted with a negative in a darkroom and an enlarger.

That's the way I learned photography: You make your picture in the camera. Now, so much is made in the computer. ... I'm not anti-digital, I just think, for me, film works better.

The picture's over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

I became enamored with photography when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I've been at it ever since. I studied seriously in the '70s.

I've found even after nearly 30 years of doing this, there are all kinds of new surprises that rear their heads at various times and I truly believe that 51% of the images, success takes place in the darkroom.

You have a negative, and you can have an influence whether you want to have it more contrasty or less contrasty; you can pre-flash the photo paper. You can make it warmer or colder, lighter, darker. This is all a way of manipulating the image in a normal way, not changing the pixels.

A neighborhood friend showed me how it was possible to go to a camera shop and pick up chemicals for pennies... literally... and develop your own film and make prints.

Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

I started as a black-and-white teenage photographer, and I'm still there decades after. In some ways, the genre is almost gone. I am thinking of true, stubborn, lifetime black-and-white photographers, as opposed to black-and-white as a photographic commodity.

WhenIWasYourAge: It took a week to learn whether your photos came out okay.

I come from the school of thought that feels that if you can shoot film, you should shoot film.

I have a good friend who's a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody's going to goof my film, I'd better do it. I don't want to get that mad at anybody else.

Darkroom work had, after all, never interested me except as a means to an end; the place I wanted to be was outside in the light.

There's plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film - I don't think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that's going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I'm color-blind.

Since the recording process is instantaneous, and the nature of the image such that it cannot survive corrective handwork, it is obvious that the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed.

I remember how difficult it was to perform certain operations on gelatine prints. A few weeks ago I asked my gelatine printer at Picto, "Can you make just the shadows a little bit brighter?" He gave me a very strange look because in Photoshop you just turn a button, and we're used to that now, but it is totally impossible in gelatine silver printing.

It's more fun if you can control things like lighting and make special effects in the darkroom.