Photography of Dave McIntire

All photographs on this page are copyright © 2004 Dave McIntire All Rights Reserved

There are two standard approaches to the craft of modern photography: traditional film/darkroom methods and the more recent, digital camera/inkjet printer technology.  The production of digital negatives for contact printing in the darkroom represents a hybrid of traditional methods and the newer digital technology.  Briefly, this approach involves image capture by film or digital methods, construction of a digital image file by negative scanning or image transfer from a digital camera, image editing in Photoshop or a similar editing program, printing a new digital negative at the desired print size, and contact printing the digital negative on photographic paper in the darkroom.  Digital negatives are used for making black and white prints, and have not been used in color photography. Some of the advantages of the use of digital negatives are: image capture can be either digital or film; digital image editing is more powerful and flexible than darkroom editing; and the final print can be made on standard photographic paper using traditional toning and archival methods.  Although inkjet printer technology has improved enormously in recent years, many photographers still prefer standard photographic paper for printing black and white images.