On 6/20/2014 2:29 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , Stephen
wrote:

This might be of interest. It's about schools around
Boston where film photography and darkroom classes
are popular. Apparently they had to find a store to
get them a supply of materials:


http://betaboston.com/news/2014/06/1...l-film-photogr
aph
y-s
till-popular-at-some-local-schools/

apparently those schools haven't received the memo about digital
photography.

Crealde School of Art offers photography classes including "PH144
Black & White Film Photography". The also have a darkroom rental
program.

http://www.crealde.org/photography.html

The teacher, Peter Schreyer, has quite a solid CV.
http://www.crealde.org/Faculty/Peter...yer/index.html

Quite a nice guy, too. I've participated in some programs with him.

yet another school who hasn't got the memo.

just what do these people who are taking the classes expect to do with
their new found skills? open up a custom darkroom lab?

Make beautiful prints that generations can enjoy.

prints can be made from digital.

With digital, the files would be lost once the person loses interest
in keeping the files up to date & accessible. Assuming the storage
medium even lasts. Digital needs a cpu, software, a display and
something to read the medium the digital file is on.

nonsense. film needs low humidity storage and there are no backups.
once they're damaged, they're *gone*.

digital will outlast any physical media, with unlimited numbers of
backups that can be anywhere in the world, so no risk of natural
disaster damaging anything.

Film doesn't require special equipment to view, you can see the image
on the film with your eyeball.

only if you don't mind postage stamp sized images, and for negatives,
they'll be reversed.

plus it's trivial to pull up any digital image, especially since
everyone has a computer, tablet or smartphone.

there is no reason to teach film photography any more than there is
teaching how to work a printing press. they are skills that are no
longer needed.

So, the catalogs that companies like Grizzly, Mouser, Digi-key and B&H
Photo send out don't exist? Then there are books, magazines and
newspapers.

the bulk of their business is online sales, not from a paper catalog,
which most companies don't send out anymore anyway.

plus, it's a *lot* easier to teach and learn digital photography than
it is film.

The only difference between the film and digital, is what's needed to
get the final output. Well, there is another, electricity isn't
needed to take a photo on film...

the days of mechanical cameras are *long* gone.

Would not a black and white print using a laser printer with carbon ink
on a no-acid paper keep quite well? It could be scanned back into a
computer system if necessary. Color prints might be best stored
electronically and copied to current media from time to time if they
have value.

Admittedly, silver separation negatives can keep very well, witness the
color prints of Prokudin-Gorsky from about the end of the nineteenth
century but I can't see anyone making such negatives now.

--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not." in Reply To.