Digital imaging technology demands attention for its ability to render images with outstanding clarity.

It’s easy to achieve a decent image with automated algorithms that render pictures of a quality that it took decades for film, chemicals and paper to achieve.

If only it was so simple as great pictures, less work.  It’s also sitting at a computer versus standing by an enlarger; pushing a “print” button instead of turning paper over in a series of chemical-filled trays; toning, washing, drying and flattening instead of…instead of nothing except setting the inkjet print aside. 

There are no smells emanating from a computer, unless you count that vague ozony whiff of warm silicon.  Compared to acetic acid, that doesn’t even count as a smell.  Among trays of clear liquids, a wet printer can identify the stop from the fix from the clearing bath by simply putting his head over each.  (The masculine pronoun is the traditional grammatical convention, not an implication that women don’t print.)

There is no slippery tactile sensation in software like there is in Dektol.  There isn’t the quick disappearance of same when a developed print enters a stop bath.  Walking into a computer room doesn’t generate that photo-Pavlovian urge to print that walking into a well-used darkroom with its lingering patina of odors triggers.

My conundrum isn’t:

 “Is it as good? 

I struggle with:

“Is it as much fun?”

My experience with computers is that they are work tools.  I was an early adopter at work, throwing my typewriter under a bus after stroking out my first sentences on a Wang word processor.

My experience with photography is that it is fun; even if it’s work, it’s still fun.  Since the day I watched my first faint image emerge in a developer tray, each print has been a little surprise.  I’ve read descriptions of drugs that have the same effect on their first-time users, creating an addiction to chasing the big buzz of that first experience.  I’ve been chasing those slowly appearing ghosts that become photographs after a couple of minutes in developer since I was 21 years old.

I’m at the early stage of digital awareness (December 2008).  I installed the current version of Adobe software and read the supplementary Photoshop^® and Camera RAW^® manuals and have fooled around with a few images, including spotting, grayscale enhancement and other things similar to darkroom manipulations.

I can’t say it was fun.  I can say it was interesting, often bordering on amazing (way cool?).  Darkroom work to achieve a certain tonal “feel” is subjective, difficult and inexact.  One controls as many variables as practical and then relies on experience, the art of it, to do the rest.  When I get it right, I experience a Hot Damn! moment almost every time I see the print.  The feeling continues through the years.  Not everybody sees it, or more correctly, feels it in a way they can express.  They just know they like it or don’t like it for their own reasons. 

I have reason to suspect digital printing can reproduce Hot Dam! moments.  I also suspect that the mechanics are more precise, repeatable and easier, once a certain familiarity with software and printer characteristics is established. 

There are infinite possibilities and controls to learn in order that they become second nature solutions to particular situations.    Very similar, really, to knowing film/developer behavior, enlarger, paper and print developer combinations.  There’s a lot of knowledge, but it doesn’t seem overwhelming because it was learned organically; not from a book, but from experience, maybe partly from a book, maybe a conversation or how-to article.  Photoshop and its software cousins seem daunting because of the sheer volume of information crammed onto silicon and easily accessible, once you figure out what to call what you’re looking for. 

I applaud the developers for using traditional photographic terms to a great extent so analogue folks like me can probe digital photography on familiar terms. 

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