20/11/2023
When I donated all of my darkroom equipment to a local school back in the 1990s I figured my darkroom days were over. I was pretty happy with the digital transition...trading chemicals for computers. After all, the craft was still there I just had a new toolbox to do the work. When I learned that an old photo had been selected as the cover of a Zappa album I began pouring through my old books of negatives, digitizing many of them. A touch of nostalgia for the old way began to set in. Thinking how that exact piece of film was in the Palladium back in 1977 when the shutter clicked to capture that reflection off of Frank. It made me realize how close a photographic print is to the original subject. The light at the concert. The light through the negative to make the print. So much more direct than the digital images that bounce through countless digital steps on the way to the screen. When I learned that our local college NC State offered a darkroom class in a really nice facility I signed up for a semester. I spent the fall of 2022 getting back in touch with my darkroom roots. I was surprised how much I loved the time back in the darkroom. It took no time to get into a routine of printing - evaluating - adjusting to get the prints exactly how I wanted them. It's much HARDER to get the exact exposure with wet prints. Lots of testing and retesting. And I had to take good notes since there's no saved profile like with a digital scan or correction. All of the exposing and dodging and burning is manual for EVERY print. Plus there's no photoshop to clean up the prints so cleaning the negative was critical.
In the end I'm super happy with the results. I have 37 total prints. Most are 11x14 but I also made a few that are 16x20. I'll be slowly releasing these out into the world. No hurry. I'm hoping they will find homes with people that will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them. Here's a little video I put together of darkroom adventure plus a few other bits of history of how the Zappa cover came together.
https://youtu.be/71mB7suUJLg?si=N13UHvrw8TqsQEpM
