It’s Fall and I’m back in my Winter base of operations, Las Vegas, Nevada. The fall season and the entire fourth quarter of 2024 brings with it an entirely new frontier with our digital darkrooms!
My client base is generally in the group of people that would like to learn more about the wonders of travel with their cameras, and the digital darkroom. Now, all over the web you can find blurbs that will teach you specific elements about a certain camera or a lens.
My intention in that regard has never been to reinvent the wheel. If you are a technophile that wishes to learn the intricate specifics of a camera or a lens, my blog is not the place for you. If you are the type of person that would like to learn how to set your Photography apart from others? This is the place!
In that realm we must discuss the digital darkroom! Why? Because anybody now a days can take pretty good images with their smart phones. If you wish to set your art apart from the droves of cell phone selfies and social network travelers eager to capture a location, simply to post that selfie on a social networking site?
There are three things we must be willing to learn…
- How to keep locations a “secret”
- How to edit our images beyond what can be done with a cell phone
- Color management and the process of printing our work
All three of these things generally involve computers. Actually this is the digital age and everything involves a computer, but that’s a subject for another post…
1. Keeping Locations A Secret
This is actually the simplest thing to accomplish on the list. Simply do not post your locations on Social Media. Also? Do not allow others to hijack your posts with “yeah, I’ve been to Shangri-La here is my pic to prove it.” (this one really chaps my hide! It’s my FB wall…) A comment about how you might like my capture of the location would be nice!
Not a comment on my wall about “yeah been there done that.” Now with well known places this policy is not necessary. But if I’m showing an image of a place not very well known…(and I search for these all the time) I am not going to post that location online, so don’t even ask.
I will gladly take you there, and teach you how to obtain your version of that location. I will also ask you to respect how special that location is, and not post it either. There are currently many locations that can not handle the traffic generated by social media “sharing”… including all of our National Parks.
This topic is also a hotbed of controversy so I’ll leave it at that.
2. How To Edit Your Images
This topic really involves the Digital Darkroom! Photographers are fairly famous for buying the latest and greatest cameras and lenses. There are entire internet platforms developed for the keywords associated with “what’s the best camera” or “who makes the best lenses” or any number of specific keywords you can think of in this realm.
However! Very few Photographers research whether or not their current digital darkroom can handle the enormous files created by that 60 megapixel camera! They will research the crap out of that camera and all of the lenses associated with it…
Yet when they’ve bought that latest and greatest Camera, then they go looking for a cheap computer that “will work.” Most of the time they wind up with a “Ferrari” containing a “Volkswagon” motor.
When it comes Photography our computers and the peripherals associated with the Digital Darkroom need to be top of the line. If you leave yourself at the mercy of a computer salesman telling you “this is the bees knees!” “This is more computer than anyone needs,” you will be sorely mistaken.
Most people are not computer power users. Especially the young people out there! They do everything on that Phone! The only people I am on par with computer wise, are the Apple Genius’s themselves. Those guys and gals are my peers. I have people I associate with on a regular basis that are all computer nerds. Not just Apple either! But the PC world as well.
3. Color Management
This topic will get you all kinds of responses on the web! Color Management is exacting science. The web is opinions. So a lot of people out there wish to discuss their version of the science. This leads to confusion and so many wrong opinions it’s difficult to discern the true facts.
Printing your art is the only true realm that your Photography ever will be represented correctly. However even there you will have difficulties finding a Printer that represents excellent work. Most of them represent prints that are “good enough” because they do not wish to educate their clients on color management. Their clients are shopping price, and simplicity, not quality.
The Digital Darkroom 2024
The fall of 2024 introduces huge changes in the Digital Darkroom. AI is taking the computer world by storm. Why? Because we can use AI to decrease the dependency of a brain for repeatable operations.
This part is killing me personally because I can no longer seem to get a carbon life form on the Phone! So customer service is taking a huge hit! When I have a computer problem it’s not the normal scenario that AI can handle. A lot of the time I will have the “experts” stumped.
AI is also using more computer resources. So Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop can take more time to complete specific AI tasks, like Generative Fill. Our computer programing needs and hardware needs are increasing all the time.
Back in the day we were using Floppy Disks. These storage devices hold only 1.44 MB of Data! My camera files come out of my camera at 60 to 85 MB! So a Floppy will only hold one of my images, two at best. Back in the day I built my computers with a one gig hard drive. Now a days I have many terabytes of storage, and I’m rapidly filling them.
There are changes rapidly happening to software. At the very least you should be subscribing to the LightRoom Queen. Victoria Bamton is the LightRoom Queen. She is based across the pond. Her Newsletter is valuable for all things Adobe, especially LightRoom.
The TK 9 Panel
Tony Kuyper is the father of Luminosity Masks. He’s not really the father of them. Advanced PhotoShop editors have been using them for years. Tony is famous for having the first panel that allowed us less time to create the luminosity masks we were using. There are others out there now.
Everyone seems to think they can reinvent the wheel and do it better than the last guy. I’ve stuck with Tony Kuyper and never regretted that decision. The latest update to TK9 v3 enables some real improvements!
The biggest improvement is we can now incorporate the TK9 button clicks into actions we create! This is huge! This feature alone will speed up my editing processes! We also have “calculators” that allow us to add, subtract, and intersect masks! Huge!
The things that we can do now with editing our images would totally blow the mind of Ansel Adams, and other masters of the past.
Digital Printing
We can now print images far, far better than images of the wet darkroom. Those images also have longer archival quality too. We also now have more advanced Digital Darkroom Papers as well for printing those images!
Color management is the most important aspect of printing. If you are not looking at your images properly on your computer screen you will never see them correctly as a print.
So What’s This All Mean To You?
Bottom line Digital Photography and The Digital Darkroom is not the Photography of the past. It has vastly improved! This is a matter of opinion mind you. There are film aficionados out there that will say digital is no where near as good. It looks “more processed.” They could be right. That’s their opinion and they have every right to have that opinion!
Digital Photography can be “very clean.” Mostly because there are less imperfections in the overall process. Also because there are computer algorithms creating our perceptions of the light we see, and then converting the one’s and zeros into an image we can see on the back of the camera.
At the same time the jpeg preview is recorded for our viewing on the back of the camera, a raw file has been created on the digital media recording the result. Instantly! Even at 120 images a second now a days! Holy crap Batman! That’s how fast a computer can record and process all of that data! In nano seconds!
It is then our responsibility to process that data into what we saw in our minds eye. Either that or be happy with what the computer came up with. Any way you look at every single image is manipulated in one form or another for our viewing pleasure. In that respect not one thing has changed from the film days!
Every single image from the past was processed in the wet darkroom! So!…
If you would like to learn how to set yourself apart from all the computer images displayed online, you must interject your mind into the mix. I teach that.
You should have a well set up Digital Darkroom and be studying the process of converting that digital data into imagery befitting your style. I also teach that.
You might wish to see and Photograph some locations others are not aware of… I can show you those. I can also assist you to keep those special places more pristine and “untouched”…
You might also wish to meet others of the same mind set that can not wait to join you in the journey? I can introduce you to them…
If you are looking for the right camera to buy for your uses, and the right lenses I can assist with this as well, and very likely save you some money in the process!
How do I accomplish all of that Garrett? It’s simple. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel @bywinslow… Subscribe to my blog and keep reading it. Go on some PhotoSafaris with me. Become a member of my private group ByWinslowCampfire.com
With the ByWinslowCampfire group in a very short period of time I am proud to say that I have even taught total beginners with PhotoShop how to move around in that program and edit their images better than they ever thought they could.
So what say say you? Tired of sitting on the fence? Come join us!
Thanks for being here and spending your valuable time!
