I have taken an awful lot of photos, really starting with the ability to get free film and processing when I worked in a camera store during college back in the mid-1980s.  With few exceptions, I have set up my crude darkroom in houses and apartments in Kentucky, Boston, New Haven, Chicago and Colorado.  The ease of making images with digital photography has radically changed how everyone takes photos.  The rise in the interest in older photo methods - Diana and Holga plastic lens cameras, alternate processing, etc. - is an interesting reaction against the 'cold' technology of digital imaging.

My Holga does not take 'good' photos.  It vignettes the edges, is liable to double exposures, lens flares, and has multiple and apparently changing light leaks.  None of these things can I easily do with my digital cameras.  I'm not exactly sure why you would want to do this, but it does take making images back to the slightly magical days of darkrooms, film and chemicals where the images slowly appeared on the photo paper in the developing liquid, like treasure spied on the bottom of a stream.

photos by Mark Gerwing