a return to the darkroom

It seems that the art of darkroom photography is quickly becoming something of the past. Many photographs that we see in advertisements, in magazines or on gallery walls, are digital alterations of the perceived world. Though technology has dramatically changed the world of Photography and graphic design, I find it refreshing to return to the darkroom. In a photography class I had in college, a local photographer came and spoke in class. He had started off in darkroom photography and later moved to digital. He explained that, although his recent pieces have been more abstract and all done on the computer, he believed that the darkroom allows the artist to manipulate the photo more than a computer program. The more I study photography, the more I see all the options available in the darkroom. In my photo's below, I barely scratched the surface of all the possibilities of the darkroom. I used contrast filters in nearly all the photo's and dodged or burned where needed. In the third photo, instead of dipping the exposed paper in a tray of developer, I wet my fingers and splattered the paper. This brought a bit more to an otherwise drab photo.