It takes a lot of ambition, interest, and curiosity to have the drive to go back to the traditional roots of photography and get stuck into manual photographic printing and processing. For me, however, we find this to be an utterly rewarding process in our constant exploration of the medium.
In this tutorial, we will go through the basics of what is needed to set up your very own black and white photographic darkroom.
In this article we will be taking you through the process of a portrait-based outdoor photoshoot on a budget. The only things you need to recreate this collection of images are yourself, a friend or client, a camera with a lens and the great outdoors. This set of tips will show you that you don't need an expensive setup of lenses, reflectors and lights to create stunning portraits to be proud of.
In traditional (film) photography ISO (or ASA) was the indication of how sensitive a film was to light. It was measured in numbers (you’ve probably seen them on films – 100, 200, 400, 800 etc). The lower the number the lower the sensitivity of the film and the finer the grain in the shots you’re taking.
Digital cameras usually save images in either jpg or raw format (or both), depending on the camera model and settings. The downside to jpg is that they start to deteriorate or loose quality from the first time you edit the photos. Furthermore, even before the editing stage, your digital camera compacts the image into a smaller file when it saves JPG format. Therefore loosing all the raw information that was originally gathered by the camera.