The world is digital right? Well it is--mostly. I teach a photo 1 class at Allegheny and we still teach in the darkroom. I am conflicted a little being a digital convert and knowing that most of my work is dependent upon the benefits of the digital world, I stay later on assignments and can find potentially more meaningful storytelling moments, I can easily check my take and see if there are holes to be filled with more photos etc..... But there is something that will never happen in the digital world and that is the serendipitous 'stuff' that can happen in the chemical process. I remember discovering years ago after making an obviously poor exposure in the enlargement stage of the process and deciding to try to solarizes and play around a little with moving chemicals around and contaminating them to see what I could get. I discovered I could get reds, oranges and yellows to appear in the black and white prints. I never learned how to control it--perhaps if I stuck with experimenting. I expected these to fade away over the years and some have changed a little, but some remain. I took this picture tonight of one of the prints I made of the guitarist for Seven Nations. Now the original isn't this red, but it is red and grey and orange-ish in color and tones. The Lucifer lens with Blanko film made it a heightened red for sure. I might try to preserve some of these old experimental images with either digital scans or just making digital photos with my slr and iphones and just let them be what they are in the next generation. Photograph by Richard Sayer.