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My name's Willie Osterman
I am teaching a class called The Zone System in the Fine Print
It's an analog class, meaning that we
come in here to the dark rooms
and process using wet chemicals and make
these un-digital types of
negatives onto
analog film
I've been teaching this class off and on for the last twenty-some years
Less
more currently as the whole world seems to go digital
We are trying to maintain
analog courses here at RIT Personally I'm working on a lot of
projects dealing with wet plate collodeon, which is exposing onto
chemicals put onto a glass to make an original glass plate
and things like that
As so much of the technology goes that way digitally
being how I usually am I'm going that way more towards the analog world
What do you think about doing that one?
-How many rolls do you have to process? -Eight?
Go, girl!
-Should I process or print? -No, go process. And then we'll print together on Tuesday
Remember by Thursday you need three prints
This area around you is the uh...
I'll give you a little tour, would you like a little tour of the place, come on let's have a tour
This area here is the wet dark rooms
Behind you -- here let's walk over here -- is the
RA4 processor for processing color paper. You go into the little door
on the other side, put it in, and
four or five minutes later it comes out processed and dry
at the other end
These are light tables and viewing booths
And down each of these hallways we have I think ten dark rooms down each one
This is a faculty dark room
And all the dark rooms along this side are like this, they generally have two
enlargers
in them
a black and white head and a color head on one
so you can do both processes
and then of course all the other accoutrements
This is the faculty dark room so it's (laughs)
unfortunately not as clean as the student darkroom
uh... because the students have to check in and check out and clean up before they
leave
Digital photography
came in
you know it's a revolution in the field of photography if you consider
how many years photography has been around
digital's much quicker, there's a
different sensibility to the digital materials than there is with the traditional analog products
So there's that kind of
difference in it and for me more importantly is the hand use of the object, meaning personally I enjoy walking around a darkroom more than I enjoy
sitting behind a computer, it's still just a different way of working
It creates a different
a different way of working, a different interactivity