I recently stumbled across a black and white film photographer with an interesting YouTube channel. He does good work and his videos are fairly entertaining. As I was digging into his video archive I noticed he had done something concerning the importance of focusing on a single photograph … quality vs. quantity. Fair enough. He essentially went through his entire process, all the way to mounting, matting and framing.  I was fine with everything except for one important thing. He scans his negatives so he can review them on his computer instead of making proof sheets.

You might say this isn’t a big deal, but I think it is. In fact, I think it’s a really BIG DEAL!!! Look, if you’re going to be an analog photographer, BE ONE ALL THE WAY and forget about viewing your negatives using Lightroom or whatever else is out there.

Yes, I know … it’s fast and yes it’s easy to do it that way. But that’s not the point is it. Art is hard, so why look for fast and easy when you can do things slow and steady and get much more out of it? Otherwise, I think you are just fooling yourself. Our photographer spent over six hours to get the final print he liked, then went to the trouble to expertly spot the print where necessary.  Great, but why take all this time and effort, only to replace one of the most important series of steps … making the proof sheet, then carefully studying it for size, composition, cropping, print tonality, etc. ON THE PAPER YOU’RE GOING TO PRINT ON … and replacing all of this by merely staring at the screen, looking at thumbnails?

My answer won’t make those looking for fast and easy happy. Sorry, but here it is.  Don’t shortchange yourself for the sake of speed and convenience. Art is hard … at least good art is.

Stay well,

Michael