Future for High-End B&W silver lab pros

[steve_patterson]

A buddy of mine has been agonizing over the market shift from silver

to digital. He's just an ace in the traditional darkroom, has

printed stuff for books, ad agencies, museums, but he's watching the

market slip away and is in kind of quandry what to do next. Go with

another lab? Jump in a learn high-end digital output? Teach?

Considering being a stockbroker?

 

Any thoughts out there?

 

Steve

[ben conover]

Hi, I am a beginner and certainly not qualified to give the 'right' answer. I would say that with digital making such waves it is only natural that people will eventually take an interest in the more traditional art of optical printmaking. The differences are what make it all worthwhile really.

 

Cheers.

[bill c.]

Steve-- Your friend needs to realize that the most important part of his talent does not necessarily lay in his ability to work the medium, but in his eye for determining what a good image looks like.

 

I have worked in the darkroom since I was ten years old, and when I hopped on the digital bandwagon I thought I would miss wet-process far more than I do. But my product is not cranking film through a camera, or sheparding emulsions through developer baths, or even pushing pixels through processors. My product is the image, or more exactly, the response I get from the viewer when they see an image I created.

 

If your friend can determine that wet processes can allow him to achive what he wants to in photography, then he should stick with that. If he does an extensive survey of the possibilities that digital holds, and sees that they can help him achieve results he likes better than what he's getting now, then that's where he should go. If he decides that digital offers better capability but he's afraid that he won't be able to cope with learning the new technology, then he should take up currency trading.

 

Happy shooting. -BC-

[david_henderson]

I can't see the market for commercial b&w silver prints increasing, so to sustain a living he'd have to get an ever-increasing share of a local market or persuade people to travel further to get to him. The problem here is that it gets harder and eventually, impossible. And if it isn't his own lab then he'd need to carry the owners with him, and they might not be keen to invest more effort in a declining market.

 

More optimistically he could learn to print digitally and offer the two services side-by-side. Its still quite difficult to produce a great b&w print digitally, so there may be opportunities there amonngst the Agencies/ Pros who presumably have been his core market.