In the course of my digital career over the past decade, I get asked time and again whether or not I miss the control, beauty and overall experience of having a complete B&W darkroom. The simple answer is: “No.” Alright, so there is something wistfully nostalgic about secluding oneself alone in the darkroom to mix chemistry, run water baths and watch in amazement again and again as a latent print image emerges from below the Dektol in a tray, but really I don’t miss it. Really.
“But there is something about B&W prints that digital just can’t match”, I hear. Okay, for selenium toned silver prints, or luscious palladium contact prints I agree; there is something to the medium in nice gallery lighting that is hard to match, but it never stopped Graham Nash or Stephen Johnson. “But digital can’t match the tone & range of B&W film!”
That’s poppycock. Let’s look. Here’s a Scitex CT scan done in 1999 from one of my more iconic images:
Scitex CT scan of black hands & flower.
And, you know something? That’s pretty much what the contact sheets looked like on a grade 1 paper with low contrast proofing development. The negative is thin (as intended, and as correct) but the full range of tones are there in both the neg and the excellent scan. Just check the histogram:
Lightroom histogram of shot above.
Of course, as with any B&W photographer, how I imagined the final print to be from the shot was something entirely different. The setup of this shot was rather simple: I found a model with massive black hands, and then found a variety of small white flowers for him to gently hold. I had him lay his hands over a black velvet tabletop, and uses a single overhead parabolic reflector with mylar diffusion for the lighting. Armed with my Hasselbald 500 CM, Planar 100mm f/3.5 CF, and Kodak Plus-X film, I proceeded to take a series of shots all metered with the flower placed on Zone 8, and let everything else fall along the curve. The result was an image that printed like this:
Same Scitex CT scan processed in LR via RGB for selenium tone effect.
And, let’s see just what happened to that Lightroom histogram:
Lightroom histogram of shot after processing.
Notice that not only do we achieve the full range of the negative, but we can even detect the red-blue shift (purple) that emerged after I applied a digital selenium tone effect. I would say in fact that this digital version not only matches what I was able to produce on Ilford Gallerie FB paper years ago, but surpasses it. So, do I miss the B&W darkroom? Hardly – especially now that I have a Lightroom. ;-)