Even In Digital Photography Age, High Schoolers Still Flock To the Darkroom

v3rgEz writes: In the age of camera-equipped smart phones and inexpensive digital cameras, many high schoolers have never seen a roll of film or used an analog camera — much less developed film and paper prints in a darkroom. Among those that have, however, old school development has developed a serious cult following, with a number of high schools still finding a dedicated audience for the dark(room) arts.

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Re:BTW: Only way to prevent digital source-trackin

[sexconker]

Consider how iphones put date/location info on pictures. They could also be doing it in a secret way. The only way to be sure your camera isn't "telling on you" by secretly tagging/watermarking your photo with personally identifiable information is to start with a filmy and process it yourself. Therefore, the darkroom is actually a way of maintaining privacy... who knew...? :-)

Or you could just take the pictures your digital camera gives you and rip out the meta data.
If you're implying the use of steganography, then you're a moron.

Ansel Adams

[westlake]

Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.

Allow me to introduce you to one of the great masters of the darkroom and analog photography:

Ansel Adams, "The Tetons - Snake River" [archives.gov]

Re:It's an artform

[Solandri]

I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.

It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.

Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.

Re:The actual appeal

[m00sh]

It's comparable to the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. The only worthy attraction is in the sheer retro-ness of it. It certainly isn't in the quality;

This is just dumb dumb dumb. The thing about analog sound devices have always been that they sound warm and pleasant under most settings. Of course, digital can be as good and better but the problem with digital gear has always has been there are many many settings in which it sounds horrible and only small zones where it sounds amazing.

Musicians still use a lot of analog gear and eschew digital as being a massive PITA to get right. With analog gear, you plug it in and it produces wonderful sounds. You move a few knobs around and you're done. With digital, you tweak and tweak and tweak.

Up until the current generation of DSLRs, I always felt that I wasn't *quite* there. But today, I literally have no reason to look back. I have to hand it to Canon, Nikon, etc... they've done a great job. Between the quality obtainable, the ability to go out and shoot a thousand *good* images without changing "film", the incredible range of usable ISO (sensitivity to light), in-camera preview -- and disposal -- so you actually know what you have while you're still on-site and able to try again, to readily available histograms and after-the-fact white balance... and then "developing" with Aperture or Lightroom... I'll take a DSLR every time.

I am not a huge photographer but this is my experience from all the photographs I have taken.

DLSRs can produce great images but there are so many times it produces cold, lifeless images. You can take hundreds of images and choose the best.

When I used film, a cheapo camera produced more brilliant pictures per shots. Yeah, you have to wait and have them developed but in every reel there were always some amazing shots. Now, with DLSR there are thousands of lifeless images and you edit them and enhance them until they are good. There is just so much rubbish and then a good one among them.

Maybe it speaks to my skill as a photographer but there are some film shots that are absolutely perfect to me - like something out of a magazine. I have perhaps 100 times more digital images but most are horrible and only a few that are amazing mostly because of the composition and I would probably have to set up a professional lighting to achieve that perfect shot I got a few times with film.

Re:The actual appeal

[Camembert]

Not everyone is crazy like that. Many want simply to get a realistic sound reproduction, something you can quite plainly not get from all the little plastic multimedia boxes or bose all in one system.
It must be said that a good quality vinyl record played on good equipment can sound nicely musical. Sometimes better than the cd, but this is often because there is usually less "loudness war" (overcompression) on vinyl compared to many popular music cd masterings.
This was the case with one of the last 5 Bob Dylan albums (I can't remember which one), everyone could hear on the same system that the rare vinyl edition did sound noticeably more musical, and the fault was purely in the compression used in the CD mastering process.