In the days before digital cameras and photo editing software, a serious picture maker knew how to develop film and create prints. In other words, being a good photographer meant having some dark room skills. I, of course, was never very good and my dark room skills were abysmal. I could only rarely position the film properly on the roll inside the development tank: One frame always touched another and my negatives were usually smudged. In addition, when it was time to make prints, I often contaminated them with dirt and scratches. In sum, all the analog photos I ever developed looked like crap.
They looked, in fact, like the picture I've included in this post. This picture was, however, a perfectly nice—if dull—digital image that I made yesterday while trying to capture an interesting swirl of clouds in an overcast sky. Instead of deleting it, which would have been good, I used a photo editing program (Nik) to create a "vintage" image: Today's software will convert a digital image into something that looks like I made it by hand. In the past, I spent many frustrating hours trying (and failing) to make clean—unsmudged and unscratched—prints using chemical baths in a dark room, but now I can get the same effect—a crappy picture—with the click of my mouse. What a development!
No comments:
Post a Comment