I’m definitely from the school of photography that started with film photography, therefore there wasn’t much opportunity to edit the images, unless you were processing them yourself in your own darkroom.
Back in the late 1970’s I was living in Milton Keynes and I had access to a community workshop that had its own darkroom and processing equipment and an enlarger etc.
I was also given an old Gnome enlarger by my uncle, it was quite ancient, but I learnt to do black and white printing with it. I was able to do some limited ‘editing’ by cropping the image and ‘dodging’ the image to bring up the shadows and take down the highlights. Lots of waving of hands under the projected image!
I was eventually able to set up my own darkroom in a hall closet for a few years in a small one bedroom apartment I was living in at the time.
I never explored doing colour film processing or printing. Nearly all of my early film photography was done in black and white, something I want to return to very soon. I would send off my colour films to a processing lab to get processed and printed.
With the advent of digital photography we have many tools at our disposal to edit and correct images.
I’m still one for trying to ‘get it right in the camera’ I do not use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. The subscription costs put me off considering them really.
I use Apple Mac computers (iMac + Macbook Pro) as well as my iPad Pro and iPhone, they are all linked up with the Apple Photos App for the storage of all my images and this offers non-destructive editing of those images.
I try to limit the amount of editing I do to images to cropping and correcting any horizontal/vertical alignment. I will leave all the messing around with layers and presets to you clever folks!
Ivel Mill, Biggleswade, England
