I never met a camera I didn't like! The downside of this fascination is getting hung up on equipment, which distracts you from making pictures. Most modern cameras have potential far exceeding the photographer. Sad but true. Click here for an essay I wrote about equipment lust.

Having issued the warning, here's what I like. I use a Canham DLC for 4x5, with a variety of lenses. I don't have a whole lot of experience with other large format cameras, so I can't really say if the Canham is "better" than anything else. I really like it, though. It will handle lenses from 65mm (and maybe shorter) to 450mm without bag bellows or playing tricks with the standards. In 35mm, I mostly use Nikon.

Film, the Darkroom, and Digital.

Aside from a 1 megapixel point-and-shoot, I don't have any experience with digital cameras. I've scanned film a few times, and I expect to be doing more of it in the future. I'm still mostly a traditional kind of guy.

I don't shoot much color film. In black and white, I like Ilford Delta 100 and FP4. Fuji Neopan 400 is great for hand-held work (I wish they made it in 4x5). I develop slower films in Beutler's high-definition formula. You can't buy it, since no one makes it…. it's strictly home brew. Neopan and TMAX 400 get D76 1:1. Good stuff, D76. If I could only have one developer, that would be it. My enlarger is a DeVere 4x5 (thanks, Gary!). It's solid as a rock, but it was a real pain to get up the attic steps! I use El-Nikkor lenses, but any of the modern lenses are probably pretty good.

As for paper, I use Ilford Multigrade, Multigrade Warmtone, and Kodak's PolyMax. Everything gets developed in Dektol. I use the fiber-based version of these papers….very seldom do I use RC.

The traditional "wet" darkroom is in a state of flux right now. For some applications, digital image processing makes a whole lot of sense. There are things that are very easy in the digital realm that are difficult or impossible in the wet darkroom. It offers flexibility and control that are hard to come by any other way.

Making color prints, in particular, is arguably best done in the digital realm. So, is there a future for the traditional darkroom?

In the short term, at least, the answer is "yes". There's as much potential in the traditional darkroom as there ever was. Many thousands of beautiful and expressive prints have been sloshed around in trays, and there's many more to come.

No method is flawless, but a few things concern me about digital. First, there's the issue of longevity. There are prints and negatives that have been around for 150 years that still look good. Can the same be said for inkjet prints? Epson claims a lifetime of 100+ years in its accelerated aging tests (for certain inks). Maybe they'll last. Ask me again in a 100 years.

Digital storage may also be a problem. I have negatives that my parents took many years ago. I printed them, and they look fine. How confident are you that you'll be able to read that CD in eighty years? Also, one of the "virtues" of digital is that you can delete the stuff you don't want, on the spot. How will you know you won't want that image somewhere down the road? Let's say you had a very ordinary picture of the World Trade towers…. who would keep such a thing? Sure, you can throw away negatives, but the digital realm lends itself to fast editing. The digital analogy (wow) of the box of negatives in Grandma's closet does not yet exist.

For us fine-art types, the choice is not yet clear. I've seen some good hybrid work (film scanned and then printed on an inkjet printer), but it isn't immediately obvious that it's BETTER than the traditional methods. Just different.

I'm not anti-digital (I'm writing this on a computer, after all). But I think I'll wait till the next generation of printers and scanners hits the street.

Speaking of the traditional darkroom, here's a link to a gadget I made that makes print burning simple. No, it doesn't involve fire. "Burning" means adding exposure to selected areas of the print after the main exposure. The inverse function is called "dodging". Both skills are vital to good print making.