Film - Photography

I'm one of the new generation of photographers who kind of skipped the whole film thing. I started out with a digital camera and have completely bought into the digital workflow. Unfortunately, I also felt I was maybe missing out by not having at least a basic knowledge of film photography. Since I live across the street from a community college, I decided to take a basic film photography class. While it's been quite boring sitting through the lectures about aperture and shutter speed, the darkroom is a fun experience. It's exciting to watch a print develop and see your creation. For some reason it just feels much more rewarding then creating digital prints. In fact, unless it's for someone else, I hardly ever print my digital files. Yep, there's just nothing fun about making digital prints.

Anyway, I decided to try out scanning a negative from the first roll of film I developed. I don't own a scanner so I had to borrow one and it took about forever to actually scan the thing. The quality of it isn't perfect since it's a flat bed scanner and not designed for high quality film scanning. For kicks, I tried printing an 8x10 on my HP Photosmart 7960 to see how it compares to a darkroom print. I'm actually pretty impressed with how it came out. With the greyscale ink in the HP it really can produce what looks like a real black and white image. The print isn't of the same detail as the darkroom print, but that has more to do with the poor quality scanner then anything else. If you don't hold them side by side, the inkjet print looks pretty damn good. Overall, an interesting experiment.

Here's the image I was playing with, definitely nothing special.

Posted by Kimbro Staken