BO & When will we get blah blah blah
2003-02-13 by HPA
for 15 years I have darkroom printed B&W for photographers & museums. About 2 years ago I added digital. Very busy on all fronts. I have a 2200 Epson and use both BO and greyscale RGB. Only lately has digital billings begun to top darkroom billings. BO is preferred by clients who are not demanding "gallery" quality images. Last week I produced 170 8x10" matte for a restaurant. Mostly they had old photos, copy photos, the stuff was not all that great to start with, the short range of the BO actually helped these pictures, they were very happy. Another job last week was copying Ambrotypes for a local museum, and the BO would not even come close to getting where we needed to be because shadow detail is critical. So, I use both BO & RGB b/w depending on the job. Darkroom printers are suffering much more than digital printers now, because at least manufacturers smell money in digital and are busy making products. We do a lot of alternative process printing, and this is a disaster. For printing out paper, which is the stuff you expose by sunlight and process in gold chloride, the paper has been on back order for 9 months. Only one factory in the world makes it, and they are in england, the paper can only be coated in the winter, last year's entire output was defective. Meanwhile, we are backordered on about a third of a 210 print order for a new york publisher doing a book on a san diego photographer. This has substantially delayed publication. We have averaged about 300-400 prints of this type a year for a while now, and now there is no paper. Even traditional mass market darkroom papers are getting hard to buy. This weekend, I am buying out a freezer load of Agfa paper, which is no longer made. Also, the primary films that we use in the darkroom have all been discontinued over the past year. My reading on the future is that digital is growing and may ultimately become the bulk of our business. However archival fiber is the preferred format for museums and fine-art photography buyers. Gross sales figures for the last four years indicate that fiber sales are about even (within 10%) to clients who prefer fiber. This is our most profitable area. Digital 2200 prints are so cheap and easy to produce, especially in production quantity, and reduce framing costs so dramatically, that i think that soon all decoration jobs for restaurants and public buildings will be done digitally. Another selling point to those buyers is that digital does not need fine-art insurance, it is cheap and easy to replace if damaged or vandalized. One restaurant in Seattle just had a big loss and we were able to ship replacements within 24 hours. My plans are to continue offering all these services. Tom Robinson