In a digital world, I still love film. There's a certain quality to film that simply can not be duplicated on the computer. What's more, there's nothing more exciting to me than standing under a safelight, fingers dipped in developer watching the image take form from a formerly blank sheet of paper laying in the tray.
That being said, space and time constraints have forced me to go halfway on the digital issue. I still shoot most of my photos on either Fuji or Kodak transparency or Ilford black and white film. Though the color photos must be sent to a lab, I develop all of my black and white film in my home using Kodak T-Max developer (though I am still experimenting with developers).
Once the film is developed, I digitize it at the highest possible resolution provided by my Minolta Dimage Scan Dual film scanner. I spot and fix the contrast of the resulting image in Photoshop 5.5 and save the resulting original to a CD-ROM for archiving. I typically perform as little digital manipulation on the image as needed, thus keeping with the spirit of traditional darkroom work.
To produce prints, I typically send my work out to an online processor such as oFoto.com, which is a Kodak company. The quality of my scanner produces image resolutions more than suitable for prints up to 8 by 10 inches. For web work, I optimize and resize my images in Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady.
