> the Ilford makes everything look like a picture from a local news article.
Heh heh. B&W film is a totally different world than color (although it's possible to make it similar if you scan after development). Wrapping one's head around color filters is a valuable and enlightening experience. The development itself is easy enough to do in your bathroom. Then the real fun begins: printing.
The digital editing experience pales in comparison to printing B&W film. Cropping becomes a physical activity, where you use your hands to move the rulers on the easel or the projection plane up and down and experiment with different aspect ratios and sizes and ratios of image to border. The act of making each print is often in itself almost a sort of "performance," as you, the artist, are affecting the image's development in real-time by dodging/burning/applying other effects. And the wait to develop gives you time to contemplate what you're creating, where your mind is spinning and coming up with other creative ideas as you gently agitate the photo paper and watch your image slowly come into being.
The darkroom itself is a kind-of meditative creative space, and I have extremely fond memories of staying up while in college till 2 or 3 AM, making prints and messing around with my photos. Lightroom and Photoshop are useful tools, and I've also spent a significant amount of time editing in those pieces of software, but it's hard to beat the satisfaction of making a black & white photo print on nice fiber paper.
If you're a professional wedding photographer, don't bother, it's a waste of your time and is probably not relevant to the product you're trying to deliver: memories of the event that just took place. But if you're looking for a visual creativity outlet with a deep history and a lot of flexibility and room to explore different levels of abstraction/ideas, it's certainly worth a try.
Heh heh. B&W film is a totally different world than color (although it's possible to make it similar if you scan after development). Wrapping one's head around color filters is a valuable and enlightening experience. The development itself is easy enough to do in your bathroom. Then the real fun begins: printing.
The digital editing experience pales in comparison to printing B&W film. Cropping becomes a physical activity, where you use your hands to move the rulers on the easel or the projection plane up and down and experiment with different aspect ratios and sizes and ratios of image to border. The act of making each print is often in itself almost a sort of "performance," as you, the artist, are affecting the image's development in real-time by dodging/burning/applying other effects. And the wait to develop gives you time to contemplate what you're creating, where your mind is spinning and coming up with other creative ideas as you gently agitate the photo paper and watch your image slowly come into being.
The darkroom itself is a kind-of meditative creative space, and I have extremely fond memories of staying up while in college till 2 or 3 AM, making prints and messing around with my photos. Lightroom and Photoshop are useful tools, and I've also spent a significant amount of time editing in those pieces of software, but it's hard to beat the satisfaction of making a black & white photo print on nice fiber paper.
If you're a professional wedding photographer, don't bother, it's a waste of your time and is probably not relevant to the product you're trying to deliver: memories of the event that just took place. But if you're looking for a visual creativity outlet with a deep history and a lot of flexibility and room to explore different levels of abstraction/ideas, it's certainly worth a try.