Analog photography is dead. Long live analog photography
infinum.co
infinum.co
If one is already going to go to the trouble of printing on photographic paper in a darkroom, then why not just go out and get a real enlarger, a real film camera and use real negative film? The quality will be so much better. Also you can buy professional film cameras that used to cost thousands of dollars for peanuts these days. You can send your film out to be developed if you don't want to do that step yourself, e.g indiefilmlab.com or ilfordlab-us.com.
Slightly off topic but I hate to see another lower-quality digital "reinvention" of a highly developed, high quality analog thing again (think audio).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distortion#Harmonic_distortion
As the word "distortion" in that link implies, where audiophiles go wrong is confusing "nicer" with "better."
70s dub-reggae records and the like would undoubtably sound worse if they were recorded straight to digital and pressed to CD. Similarly, lots of 21st century music would lose its edge if it were printed to tape and pressed to vinyl.
Most of this confusion stems from audiophiles borrowing terms and ideas from music engineers and artists, much like the neverending stream of badness from managers/MBAs taking ideas and terms they don't understand from engineers.
If you are listening to music, it is none of your business to decide that it needs to be "warmer." The people who made the record spent a lot of time and effort making it exactly as warm as they wanted it to be. Pushing it through a tube amp to make it warmer before you listen to it is like retouching a Monet print in photoshop before you hang it on your wall. As you can imagine, I'm not a fan of the EQ settings on ipods either.
When optimising your playback system, go for maximum transparency, and stop there. If you don't like how the record sounds, listen to better records.
If you're making records OTOH, it is entirely proper for you to be worrying endlessly about "warmth". Buy up crazy 70s gear from ebay, have the track pressed to 60g vinyl at a boutique german cutting house, whatever it takes. Warmth is tricky :)
The idea is is that if you can make a mix sound good through them, they'll satisfy as a general purpose sound product.
This is one important reason why the music on vinyl sounds nicer. Not because of the harmonics, but because of the mastering. The medium does not allow very high dynamics and you need to compromise.
Also, like I said above, it's about conveying the intention of the artist. While that recent metallica album sounded like shit and might have been better if it were mastered for vinyl, the wax pressing of the below-linked record sounds boring and lifeless because it lacks the downloadable version's obscene dynamic range:
Albums like Death Magnetic are particularly egregious examples of this, but I think that every CD suffers somewhat from this obsession with making the CD itself so damn loud. We have amplifiers for a reason.
Yeah, I know.
There's nothing preventing audio engineers from introducing harmonic distortion, wow, flutter, pops and ticks, reduced channel separation or equalizing a CD master differently.
There's nothing magical about vinyls and they are inferior to CDs in all possible ways.
Yes but if you want it to sound like vinyl you have to press it to vinyl. Introducing all those things in software will generally sound kinda crappy and it's fiddly. You can do it in hardware, but that's likely more effort than just sending it off to get an acetate pressed or something. I'm not campaigning for it, just trying to make the point that there are no rights and wrongs in a creative process.
And there is something magical about vinyl: the 1:1 correspondence between the physical medium and the stored sound means that DJing vinyl will always be a more satisfying experience for the DJ than any other playback technology. A turntable has almost no state to worry about: once can operate a pair of decks and a mixer blindfolded, by touch alone. The same is not (generally) true of traktor or CDJs. This promotes the "flow" state of mind, and therefore higher quality DJing.
This is the primary reason why vinyl still exists in 2013, and it's the only reason why countless twentysomethings like me have thousands of records stacked up in their bedrooms.
I think perhaps expectations for what a standard size music collection have changed as music media has become lighter and lighter.
I still have lots of paper from that time -- certainly useless by now.
I think this is kind of cool though; the big difference with a real film camera is that you get to do it picture by picture.
On a film camera you have to expose a whole roll of film, then process it, then go back and see what shot you want to develop (which is not easy if you only have the film; I used to order small prints to help me choose which pictures I wanted to print myself).
With this, you can go ahead and print the picture you just took.
Will the quality be a little crappy? Probably. But it's a toy! What's wrong with toys? Would you complain that your kid's toy car doesn't have a real gas-powered engine?
Well, it's not even going to give you the same kind of resolution the actual photo is stored at! You're taking a downsampled analog representation (the light coming off the screen) of an image and further reducing the quality by enlarging it, all the while using fairly poisonous chemicals.
>Will the quality be a little crappy? Probably. But it's a toy! What's wrong with toys? Would you complain that your kid's toy car doesn't have a real gas-powered engine?
Ah, touché. It's easy to be grumpy when your own enlarger has been collecting dust for years…
" speaking as someone who used to spend hours and hours as a kid in the 1980s in our garage, making prints in our home-made darkroom."
That is why, the grand parent has an emotional attachment to the memories of making prints in their garage, and someone has made a toy which will give someone a "photography like experience" (sort of like an "Easy Bake" Oven gives you a cooking experience) and they cry inside over the cartoon like experience of something that was so transformative in their life. It expresses as hate.
When they put in an escalator on Mt. Everest for the last pitch, when you "run a marathon" in virtual reality, or when you replace all the chemicals in a chemistry set with water. Basically if you take an experience that someone had, and make it accessible by reducing the challenge and/or fidelity you will invoke this reaction on people whose emotional enjoyment of their memories is the challenge or fidelity.
That said, I don't think it will be all that successful. We were quite successful helping folks enjoy analog photography with light sensitive paper and pin hole cameras. Even contact prints of leaves or insects can give you a sense of wonder. This seems like it will be much more expensive than that without much in the way of additional depth so the value proposition is effectively lower.
Well I can store thousands of photos on a microsd card and decide later which ones I want to put on paper. Film is much less flexible that way.
The buggy whip industry still exists, because there are people who in fact want new buggy whips. You can still get record players. Would be nice to see a remnant of the photo[chemical] industry continue, and these guys are doing exactly that by bridging how most photos are now taken with a way to use the old "expose & develop" model.
Here we have a product that a curious person (like myself) interested in learning how photography used to work would buy in a heartbeat, and still the top three comments (as I write) are " Who is this for?", "This is so goddam stupid." and "That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen".
If these guys are doing this is because they would buy it. It doesn't matter if the size of their potential market is ridiculously small, it is still a market and they want to test it. There is no need to verbally destroy somebody else ideas.
Sometimes we should keep in mind that phrase : "If you don't have any positive thing to say, don't say anything"
The iPhone has a 8MP sensor, the screen is 0.6MP why would you intentionally handicap yourself like this? So you use it to develop the results and realize the picture looks like shit. So why bother.
"The King is dead, long live the king!" is a special phrase used only when a ruler is dead and there is an immediate and available heir to assume the throne. It implies uninterrupted line of accession.
"Analog photography is dead, long live analog photography" is not a correct usage of this phrase. A better way to phrase it would be : "Photography is dead, long live photography!" Implying that the old way is dead (analog) but the new way (digital) will immediately succeed it.
I refuse to visit the link and will, if possible, downvote the whole article just because of the headline. Were it more truthful and descriptive, "guy does something with analog photography" I would have nothing to complain about, but now?
Time to call up some russians and arrange a DDOS.
I wonder by how much this will increase exposure times, and if it works at all...
I work in a darkroom, I have a lot of experience processing film by hand and making prints. I know a bit about it.
This seriously looks designed by someone who has never spent more than two hours in a darkroom. Encouraging people to set up tiny darkrooms in closets or wherever they can with trays of open chemistry, is a bit irresponsible.
Here's the MSDS for Ilford Multigrade, the developer they recommend: http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/2007117133512849.pdf And for the Rapid Fix: http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/2012430120381541.pdf It's not super dangerous stuff, but you still need to take some reasonable precautions with it.
And that tray rack? Anyone who has ever worked in a darkroom would never think of stacking trays like that. You need to pick up the print from the chemistry and let the excess drip off before moving to the next tray--this setup is going to be having people spilling photo chemistry all over the place, in a room with no ventilation. Smart.
All the text on the indiegogo site just sets off my rage. Everything at Ilford is not "vintage technology", they have been churning out new products for years. And this? "Old school print development makes every print slightly different, due to microscopic imperfections in the silver halide coating on paper and the chemical reaction that turns parts of the coating black or grey." This is just plain wrong.
This isn't preserving analogue photography. It's trying to sell the idea of being a darkroom. The indiegogo has lots of text about red light bulbs (most darkrooms use amber lights, but I digress), prints hanging on a line, the smell of chemicals, but almost no examples of what the prints made with this thing look like. Why? Because that's not the point.
Any serious photographer would not want this as the results are going to be complete crap.
Any casual photographer would not want this because it does nothing to get their shitty photos onto Facebook.
The only people who would like this would be pseudo-intellectual hipsters who think they are "keeping it old school". This is a scene straight out of Portlandia. Let's open an "artisanal" cupcake shop that makes everything in an original, 1963 Hasbro Easy-Bake Oven!
This is like trying to make a gourmet sandwich out of a Hot Pocket.
I think I must be getting time-trolled. People come up with ideas to deliver me 5 minutes of hate on a Monday morning.
Let's put together cheap things to waste massive amounts of time in the pursuit of crap, disposable techno-folk-art. Thank goodness the bombing starts right after football kicks into high gear.
Such a quote is not a talisman. Focusing on the good coming from irrelevant pursuits is confirmation bias and applying such a quote broadly is a slacker's crutch. Let's look at all the semi-self-serious stoners, punks, drunks, libertarians, etc. contemplating the irrelevant... accomplishments? Only if we want to say "do no harm" is better than what they'd do with a bit more ambition.
You're seriously equating "retro home photo printing" with "stoners, punks & drunks" just because it's "irrelevant"? Really? Is the difference not obvious? Do I really have to spell it out?
BTW: the USA was created by a bunch of libertarians.
Is this a film reference? It seemed like a total non-sequiter, except I think I watched the referenced film just yesterday.
The end result of the photo is not the point here. No one is saying that the results are good quality! But it's fun to make things like this.
One big problem I see is photo chemical disposal. We have gotten to the point in understanding the chemistry of photo chemicals and it's effects down the line that you really shouldn't pour most of it down the drain any more. The stop bath is usually equivalent of vinegar but the developer and fix have some mildly toxic stuff in them as well as trace amounts of silver. I would think the hobbyist with a dedicated darkroom would have a better chance of knowing this as opposed to something like this meant for a more causal user.
So blurry or pixelated. Your choice :)
N.B this might be desirable from an artistic point of view though.
Edit: There should really be a couple sample images on the project page.
A photo sensor in a digital camera is an analog device. The "digital" camera requires an ADC (Analog to digital Converter).
Camera film records information digitally, the light sensitive film (silver halide) either lets light through, or it doesn't. Basically the silver halide crystal is either "on" or "off".
Correct!
>Camera film records information digitally, the light sensitive film (silver halide) either lets light through, or it doesn't. Basically the silver halide crystal is either "on" or "off".
Uh, no. There is a continuous range of the amount of light that is blocked by the film negative (for each layer). What you're describing would be something like 1bit color depth RGB.
"Because you can" does not mean "you should ever" create, sell, or buy such a thing.
Maybe if the iPhone screen had an 8K screen, it could be interesting. But come on.
Why don't we photocopy ourselves, take a picture of that, and fax it instead?