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M3W Sport Blue - 'Canopus'

Morgan M3W blog: http://goo.gl/z7nuSx

While I really enjoyed black and white film and the printing from it in the darkroom, I find that I can make better black and white prints now, wholly digitally, than I ever could in the darkroom. I will add that the learning curve to get to this point has been long and steep and also that It's not because I was hopeless at conventional printing.

The bellows camera I use is an old Ensign and it uses 120 film which I buy from boots. Amazing that they still stock it.

Calum is right. The irony is, in order to make this iPhone image look reasonable I had to make it look worse. It is difficult to do this the other way around.

Im all for using film. What I don't miss about it, is the excitement then disappointment that the end result wasn't what you had in your head. But the downside to digital is, future generations will be left with fewer printed images.

Absolutely. When I had a darkroom, I managed to produce a fair number of prints. I really enjoyed it, although unlike Calum I suspect my enthusiasm probably exceed my skill.

But these days I can achieve so much more on a laptop at zero cost in materials, and having my pictures available on the computer means I actually look at them far more. I have packets of prints that I haven't looked at in over 30 years.



Agree about the disappointment, I have plenty of experience of that :), but why will having fewer printed images be a bad thing? We'll always be able to create them if we want them, and today's online services gives us much easier access to high-quality printing than in the old days.

When I was a kid, developing B&W film from my Kodak Brownie Camera I used to pour spent chemicals down the drain....

I took a look at the MSDS for some Ilford developers and fixers. All say Take to a specialist disposal facility.. I'll bet that costs more than the chemicals.

I'll also bet that the majority of DIY users pour it down the drain.....

I've got a nice Canon EOS film camera that gathers dust in the camera case.... I am tempted to try some B&W film and do some photo processing..

At the moment i am looking at a roll of XP2 and Ilford Delta 120 on top of my printer.
Bought them last year but never used.
I have a Seagull TLR which i break out now and then.
Also got Flash gun a bulbs which i intend to use when i get my car.

HP5 120 roll film and Delta 100 35mm in my bag at the moment. I use to use FP4 as a standard years ago.

I do agree with Callum though....I enjoy creating black and white prints digitally in Lightroom using film emulation plug-ins. I do miss the smell of chemicals though...not the cleaning up afterwards.
It's just nice sometimes to travel back in time and use my film cameras and separate exposure meter....there's something rather measured and reflective in using them. I still have the negatives scanned and the rest of the process is digital....cheating perhaps?

Not cheating at all, in fact getting good scans of black and white negatives is an art in itself and not one that I would claim to have mastered.
I have found that the tonality available in Raw files from today's sensors is stunning when carefully converted to monochrome whether or not any plugins are used. Do sometimes add in bit of grain as a final step just using Lightroom's built in adjustments. My cheat is often also adding a little bit of a sepia tone to the shadows along with a bit of Platinum blue tone to the highlights.