Would that be the Super Angulon?
@Claes I just enjoy looking at them because they look great and different. It isn’t because I have the desire to justify the equipment, brand, etc. Taking them was awkward but we barely got any duds compared to smaller cameras.
Super Angulon XL 47mm, usually attached to a simple home-made box camera designed for that lens. I also have the 58mm and 72mm, and these fit on more conventional cameras.
1 Like
Hm… I have a hunch that this thread soon needs a split…
Nevertheless:
would you agree that a skilled darktable wizard of today
would be able to perform the same wizardry as
what a skilled antique darkroom wizard could do in the analogue era?
- If no: what is missing, today?
- If yes: then why do we consider present-day developments inferior to what was performed then?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
You are asking the wrong person. Skill is something that I don’t have. 
Digital doesn’t yet have the resolution of 5x4. The hard digital cut-off of high frequency detail causes problems that are best solved by much higher resolution, otherwise with upsampling and “invented” HF data.
When that problem is solved, I think digital will be capable of giving 5x4-like results. It would pass the Turing test of being indistinguishable.
Digital skills are entirely different to analogue skills.
Digital: I sit in my comfortable chair and tell the computer to make the first draft of my images. Then I work on each, still sitting in my comfortable chair. My effort is mostly brain-work.
Analogue: I kneel beside my boarded-up bath in total darkness, except for the luminous hands of a stop-clock. Remove a 5x4 sheet from the box, slide it into the dev dish, rock gently side-to-side and up-to-down. Remove the film, slide it into the stop bath. Then fix, and turn on the light, and wash. Repeat for all the other sheets. That’s just the negatives. When they are washed and dried, get on with the printing. My effort is mostly physical.
4 Likes
Sometimes the beauty of a specific tool or medium are the limits that it has, and the creative methods that people come up with to work with and around those limits.
The RZA talks a lot about how the limits of the SP12 sampler fueled his creativity in his early beat making days. And that finding new techniques was a matter of working with the limits of his equipment.
2 Likes
abso-fucking-lutely. My father was an avid amateur photographer - and a pharmacist by profession. The laboratory became a darkroom on weekends and - despite having spent hundreds of sundays (really) rolling film-drums and swiveling the developer tray - I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to do in a lab what I can to with programs like darktable, RawTherapee and Gimp.
Just remember (or imagine) what it means to store paper in five gradations, provide for a bunch of different developer liquids (that need to be heated to a specific temperature for reliable results … and suffers badly with every development circle) . Try to imagine how much time and money it costs to come to terms with a personal color-grading and apply it to a bunch of photos. No non-destructive editing here, no going back and “click” for another value or setting. Every test, every new version costs money … and time à gogo
Naw kids, we’re spoiled. It has never been as easy as today.
4 Likes