Hi, all!

I've been on the B&W and Color forums for six years, I think. But my photo heritage goes back to the 1880's, through my father and his father as military and professional photographers. www.vphotoestate.com I came of age in my father's darkroom, mystified by the images that would appear on that wet paper. OK, the Marilyn Monroe calendar nude and others didn't hurt my pending testosterone.

Although never a very good printer, I love the wet darkroom. I sold my enlarger a year ago in preparation for moving. I hope to buy another some day. But the wet darkroom is a colossal pain in the ass, space and mandatory darkness aside.

I started scanning print, negatives, and slides about 8 years ago for the Verizzo Family Photographic Estate. And along the way I discovered the joys of developing B&W or C-41 film and simply scanning those negatives to make prints or just share. And the controls! Oy vey! That the wet darkroom can only wet dream of! Imperfect exposures or processing, no problemo! One can do things in the hybrid darkroom unattainable at all in the we one, or perhaps only with hours and hours of frustration and dollars in materials.

I've used scanners for some 15 years, and yes, they sucked in the old days. I'm talking flat bed for film or slides. The purist insisted on drum scanners or dedicated film scanners not many years ago, but flat beds arrived years ago. I use a Canon 8800F for everything other than 4x5's, then I use an ancient 9000F (Is that right?), it also holds more slides. Both scanners, as I recall, allow a native, non-interpolated, 4800 dpi left to right and top to bottom.

Over on the more Purist APUG sites, it's obvious that a lot of folks do the hybrid boogie, but still feel it's inferior, or cheating on the wet darkroom.

OK, enough. I'm just damned glad that technology lets me shoot film and get usable outputs with both little hassle and great results.

Very Pretty shot

Hi there,
I have just joined this group, having returned to APUG/DPUG now Photo. Like Paul I started digitising negs and slides way back , in my case the 1990's. When we moved to New Zealand from the UK in 2001 I had to give up me darkroom and the hybrid route became my life-saver.
I had a few years all digital but never really found the same satisfaction I had from using film. Easing back into film with pinholes at first and then an increasing number of older cameras, I now look on digital as a tool to digitise my negatives mainly. It is still useful when travelling and for snaps of course and the phone is now also playing its part.
I used a scanner (Epson 2450) for may years but after it gave up the ghost I now copy film with a light box set-up and Micro-Nikkor/Lens Turbo adapter on a Sony 3000 body. This gives a lot of flexibility and if I need a really large file I can copy a 5x4 in sections and join them up in Affinity Photo. Also I don't have the unsharpness from film curl to deal with that I had with the scanner on larger formats because I can stop down to compensate if it is a problem.
So, I don't consider the hybrid approach in any way inferior just a different approach and one which allows me to continue to shoot film in cameras I love to use without having to read a humungous manual and select a multitude of settings to second-guess some computer programmer somewhere.
I echo your final remark Paul.