Monochrome

Aah. The bad old days when I could only afford FP4 or HP5 black and white film.  Colour film was a luxury, but on the positive side, shooting black and white changed my view of the world and set me searching for textures, patterns and contrasts.

Making a good looking monochrome print from the negative proved just as demanding. No matter how good it looked last night in the darkroom, in the morning the prints always looked just a bit muddy.

I resorted to using harder and harder grade paper to get those really convincing black tones. Then there was the specs of dust to contend with. You could never see them under the enlarger, but they certainly showed up in daylight.

Then you had to clear up afterwards, clean the trays, dry everything off. The bathroom smelled of fixer for a few days afterwards... It was all such hard work...  

However sometimes you would come out with one nice big print that was good enough to be framed and go on the wall.

Clearly its easier now. I could set the camera to shoot monochrome if I wished, however I take all my pictures in colour regardless. (In fact I use the raw files from the camera, so there's no choice anyway). I can decide to convert the image to monochrome at a later date, and maybe - just maybe - the results are better.

I sometimes miss the grain, but I don't miss the dust.

Oh, and at least the bathroom doesn't smell of fixer these days.