What about chemical photography?

Question

Is this stil; viable? I'm not sure what to do with all my old equipment. I loved developing pictures. Handling negatives, contact sheets, enlargers. Digital photography seems so ethereal.

Answer 1

Traditional photography is in the hearts and souls of many photographers. Digital is still new and exciting. I use both and to be honest, I will probably give up digital, but I will NEVER give up my traditional and I hope you don't either.

Answer 2

There is no doubt about it, silver based photography is bit more difficult and visceral of an experience compared to digital based photography. I stress the words "a little more difficult" because lets be honest getting a good digital print is not as easy as clicking print. Way back when I used to work for Epson, and strangely our customers had this funny idea that digital is as simple as point and click. Wrong. You have to color calibrate your monitor, make sure that photoshops colors space is setup properly, make any final tonal or color adjustments to your images, make sure you are using the proper ICC color profiles for the media you are using etc etc etc... Then you can print, and even at that, you may still have to do some final adjustments.
If you are good at silver based printing stick to it, the fact is that a good silver based print is aesthetically more appealing than your best digital prints, though digital is catching up and I will not object one bit if one can create a print which is as archival and of the same quality as a silver print.

Answer 3

Why isn't it viable anymore? Printing pictures is a skill which less and less people know how to do.
Keep it. You will lose something if you sell it and not only the equipment. Almost nobody wants it anyway so for the money you don't have to do it. You will not lose anything by keeping it. You love(d) doing it so do it as long as possible. In 10 years time you will be one of the old masters.

Answer 4

That depends on what you mean by "viable". I left the photographic industry in 1980 to join the computer technology wave. Now electronic technology is bringing me back to photography. My basic credential for this comment is forty years experience in the two fields plus my love of photography.

Although Kodak and other large photo product manufacturers worked very hard to minimize the environmental impact of photo processing and to salvage as much waste material as possible it still generates chemical byproducts that can contribute to pollution. Another problem is that, as usage of silver/halide & other chemical based materials diminishes, cost increases while availability decreases.

One big advantage of digital imaging is the reusability of media, this cuts the day to day expense significantly. Film is not cheap anymore and keeping different types of film on hand for various situations is a big headache. If you run out of film (or don't have the right type on hand) you're done shooting. If you fill up a memory card you can download & erase or select images you don't want and then discard them. If light properties change you can adjust the recording properties to suit the new conditions.

Furthermore, long term and permanent storage of physical media is more complex than storing electronic images although the reliability of physical storage may be easier to verify. The quality of electronic media storage is highly variable and of unproven reliability. (Some "permanent" data written to CD's as recently as five to ten years is already irretrievable).

From the standpoint of process I find that the big difference is that you have to use different tools and techniques but the conceptual tasks are very similar.

Four advantages to digital 1) You don't need a light tight space to process, 2) You don't need to handle, store, clean up and breathe chemicals, 3) You can sit down to do most of the processing and 4) There are many ways to refine images AFTER exposure is made.

Four advantages to chemical process 1) You don't need a computer & software to process, 2) You have a simple set of variables to control - chemical formulas, time & temperature, 3) Easier (and more "fun") to learn & understand concepts of process and 4) There is a fairly predictable "time line" from start to finish for many common tasks.

In my opinion the handwriting is on the wall. Chemical processing will continue to decline to small fraction of what it is now and, I believe, will be used primarily by artists, technicians and scientists to fullfill specific requirements that are difficult or too expensive to adapt to electronic methods. But I'm not selling my enlarger, 35mm or twin lens reflex cameras anytime soon because it is educational & enjoyable!

Answer 5

Chemical:-Developer,Bleach,water.