alt Hacker NewsPrintmaking is a huge part of the art form. I think a lot of people miss this fact in the "shoot and scan" age of film photography. Not everyone cares, or even needs to care, but those who do really should read the Ansel Adams trilogy.
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Yeah, its kinda telling those who treat everything after shooting film as some sort of binary process.
I feel a lot of them would benefit more from just processing all their photos through some basic profile that ends with running it through a film simulator.
Yep a physical print is a totally different experience too, compared to an image on the screen.
With good printing software like imageprint RED/Black (NB very expensive and overkill for most) you can actually see the effect different papers, settings, and lighting will have before the print. Very fun!
"Shoot and scan" is convenient. Hard to argue with it. But hey, if you want convenience, why are still using film?
:D
But anyway, yes print making is both art and science on its own. Finding local labs to develop and scan films is pretty easy. But darkroom to print your photos the old school way? Happy to find a new one (I'm on Jakarta, btw).
I've spent a lot of time in the past 15 years turning photos into various kinds of prints. From Cyanotypes using printed contact negatives, via multi-layer stencil art to my current obsession: vectorizing images, separating the layers, machining linoleum blocks and then doing multi-layer prints. Once I have a stable workflow for lino prints the next think I'm going to try is to use mokuhanga instead of linoleum.
(I also plan to try platinum/palladium prints. They look gorgeous. But first I need to get better at shooting for B/W)