Florentine Streetscape

A cold late-December day in Florence, Italy. 1991

I'd like to take another chance to expound how much I'm loving photography in the digital world. Many of us who grew up in the darkroom age loved the darkroom process. It was part scientific and part artistic. In order to produce good pictures you needed to have the discipline, patience, and accuracy like a scientist, but you also needed the artistic talent to be successful trying new techniques and creating great photos, not just snapshots.

The downside was that it costs alot to start with, so experimentation came at a price. Plus to varying levels, it took a while to gain the experience level needed to consistantly produce technically correct shots. Ones that were not over-exposed, over-developed, or not fixed enough. And the opportunity to do color darkroom work was extremely limited. So the ability to enhance color shots (dodge, burn, crop) was pretty much impossible.

This is why I am really enjoying this opportunity to revisit so many of my old shots using a scanner and Photoshop. The chance to rescue over- or under-exposed shots. Crop them the way I'd always wanted and very rarely a chance to burn or dodge parts that were not just right. Plus as I mentioned before, to print out all the slides that I've scanned pays for the scanner a few times over. Yes, I could selectively choose shots, but I like having it all out in front of me to choose between on or the other. The digital world affords me these freedoms.

And I've only scanned a small portion of my stuff so far. So there is much much more to come. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.