Thanks

          

                         

 I have a few notes in my inbox and will get any remaining DDs queued up over the next few days. $Moonbeam13 has kindly offered to look after Darkroom Photography until a new CV can be put in place, so please send your lovely DD suggestions to her for now.

I'm not going to be vanishing from dA or anything dramatic like that. In fact, you'll probably see a lot more of my photography than you have over recent months since I'll actually have time to be creative again! Thank you all for your support and encouragement over the last year. It has been an absolute honour to be a CV for a second time and I've loved every minute.

See you on the flipside

                    

        

Instant film is film which contains all the chemicals necessary to process and fix an image without the need to develop and print it after you take your picture. Chances are, when you think of instant film, you think of Polaroid and retro 70s colours. Fuji also make instant film, under the name Fujifilm Instax, and more recently, the Impossible Project saved the last Polaroid production plan to produce new instant film materials for traditional Polaroid cameras.

One of the beautiful things about instant film is that you can create unique, beautiful effects in your images even after the film has expired. Instant film also allows for intriguing processes like emulsion lifts, when you extract the image layer from a piece of film to place on another surface...paper, canvas, wood etc. You can also distress your instant film shots while they're developing to create unusual distressed effects.

Here are some gorgeous instant film shots from dA's Darkroom > Traditional > Instant Film gallery...

                          

It's all about knowing your tools and having fun! If art can be created with a plastic film camera with no viewfinder or a 30 year old Polaroid camera, surely a camera phone held by someone with an artistic eye can be just as valid. Here are some examples of gorgeous photos shot with a phone. Enjoy!

This issue features images created with Photoshop filters (the ones found in the Filter menu at the top, rather than the colour-tinting photofilters). Half of you are probably about to stop reading and the other half of you are probably only reading in preparation to leave a ranty comment about how Photoshop filters can never look anything other than amateurish and a little bit crap.

So...I ask you to please observe with an open mind! Photoshop is, in itself, a digital darkroom, as well as a design tool and many other things too. Like any tool, it can be used with hideous concequences or it can be used with skill and expertise, resulting in lovely images. A hammer can be used to build or to destroy, depending on the intent of the person who is handling it. The important thing to remember is that, in general, no amount of editing will magically make a 'bad' photo into a 'good' photo. But with knowledge and practice, an artist can use the tools at their disposal to create pleasing results which fit with their artistic vision.

Here are some examples of that principal in action. Some are from Photography > Darkroom > Digital and some are from the other photography galleries, but all were offered for use as examples in this article by the people who created them.

*hayley--jade used the Motion Blur and Sharpen filters on this photo.

#fella is hosting a Love Letter contest for the month of February. Although it might seem that this is just a literature contest, it isn't - it's open to ALL mediums and you're encouraged to get creative with your expression of a love letter. The deadline is 28th February and you can find all the details here.

I love receiving Daily Deviation suggestions (yes, I do, in case I don't say it enough) but almost all the suggestions I get are for digital darkroom. I'd like to ask for your help in finding some really amazing traditional darkroom photography to feature to maintain the balance, so if you have a favourite traditional darkroom piece, PLEASE send it to me in a note so I can consider it for a DD (remember you can suggest your own work too).

Secondly, perspective. You're complaining about a few thumbnails of art with subject matter that doesn't appeal to you temporarily entering your field of vision. This doesn't violate or harm you in any way. You just saw something that you didn't think was amazing. Such is the nature of public places on the internet. If you go to an art gallery in the physical world, chances are you'll see some stuff that you're not crazy about. So you walk into a different section of the gallery and look at things you like. When you're watching tv, you'll probably run into some programming that doesn't float you boat. So you change the channel and watch something else. The same principal can be applied to dA.

devwatching artists who submit the kind of art you like means that their creations will appear directly in your message centre, giving you the most personalised browsing experience of all - one that you are in complete control of (you can choose to unwatch deviants at any time), that you create for yourself to enjoy at your leisure.

As with devwatching individual artists, you can watch groups whose submissions appeal to you. There are thousands of groups on dA, some focussed on a particular medium and some more subject-focussed. Watching them adds their submissions to your message centre - your personal art gallery!

Channels are a great way to create an entire page made up of 'feeds' of art that you love, based on artists, search terms, galleries etc. Rather than try to explain how this works here, I'll direct you to this FAQ which tells you how to set up your own personal channels so you get a live feed or art that you enjoy on it's own page FAQ #45: What are Channels and how do I use them?

You can search using the bar at the top from any page on dA. A good way to find art that you like while avoiding things that don't tickle your fancy is to learn the ins and outs of effective searching. This FAQ explains in detail how to do it FAQ #577: How do I use the Search?

I haven't even touched on More Like This or browsing specific galleries here. These are just some useful ways to find art to enjoy without ever having to visit the front page 

I keep writing things and deleting them because everything comes out like too much of a stupid cliche or it makes no sense and I can't find the right words to fit around what I'm feeling other than I miss you.

Digital Darkroom is for Photographs which have been digitally processed or edited with the use of computer software to emulate traditional and alternative film darkroom techniques.

Traditional Darkroom is for Scans of photographic prints and negatives where the images have been physically developed and/or printed using traditional and alternative film darkroom techniques. This gallery is not for digitally created or edited images.

It seems like an obvious difference, right? How much further explaining really needs to be done? Well, just a little, because there are a few exceptions to what you might assume to be hard and fast rules.

While photos taken with a digital camera and posted straight-out-of-camera or after being processed with computer software should NEVER be placed in Darkroom > Traditional, it is acceptable to submit darkroom prints created with digital negatives to this gallery. A digital negative is created from a print of a digital photograph on paper or transparent material and can be used to make a contact print, usually with alternative processes like cyanotypes or liquid light.

Not everyone has access to a scanner, so people often have to take a digital photograph of their traditional darkroom print or Polaroid photo to submit it to dA. This will result in camera data appearing on the deviation page of a traditional darkroom photo. It doesn't stop it from belonging in Darkroom > Traditional. It just means that a camera, rather than a scanner, was used to digitise the image for submission to dA. Some scanner data will also show up as Camera Data on dA.

While film photos generally belong in the traditional darkroom category, if you have used computer software to edit your film photo (obviously apart from digitising it to submit to dA), it belongs in Darkroom > Digital. While an extremely minimal amount of editing is acceptable for the sole purpose of making your digitised image more closely resemble the physical print (sometimes scanning or photographing a physical print can slightly alter the colours or contrast), ANY further digital editing, like using Photoshop Actions, textures or turning a colour photo monochrome, means that the resulting image belongs in Darkroom > Digital, NOT Darkroom > Traditional.

It is also worth noting that digital images edited to look like film images (for example, using Photoshop editing to create Holga-like light leak effects or adding a Polaroid-style frame to a digital photo) DO NOT belong in Darkroom > Traditional!

When submitting your work to Photography > Darkroom, it is definitely worth making sure that you've chosen correctly between the Digital and Traditional galleries because it will aid the chances of your work being featured as a Daily Deviation and also in darkroom feature journals. I browse literally every submission to the Darkroom gallery in my on-going hunt for awesome art to feature and if there's any doubt about the category a photo is submitted to, I won't feature it, however amazing it might look.

If you use a digital camera, rather than a scanner, to digitise your traditional darkroom prints for dA, it is definitely worth mentioning this in the Artist's Comments for those pictures! You might also want to consider including in your comments the camera and film that you used for your traditional darkroom photos, some information about the materials and techniques used in your alt processes images or the equipment and software used for your digital darkroom photos.