I still shoot black and white medium format, and spend about 10 hours a week in a darkroom. It’s hard to compare spending 2 hours on a print vs 2 hours on a sh

I still shoot black and white medium format, and spend about 10 hours a week in a darkroom. It’s hard to compare spending 2 hours on a print vs 2 hours on a shot in Lightroom - they’re very different processes. That being said, the reason why I enjoy it so much is because I’m working with a physical process that - once fully understood - is reliable, coherent, and predictable (to your comment about it being hard getting the exposure and contrast right - split filter processing changed my life. It removes a lot of the guesswork and basically turns it into a binary search). Working with software is anything but - I can’t count the number of times where something didn’t work quite the way it used to because of a software update, or I had to restart Lightroom to get it to behave, or some fairly direct manipulation I wanted to do was hidden under unnecessary layers of UI. Not to mention that the final output of the darkroom process is a print - whereas the final output of software is a file. Since I care about making large prints, if I worked in software, I’d still have to deal with a printer and all the mess that comes with that to get an object. The one thing that digital excels at is obviously back ups/instant duplication/being able to navigate through history/etc. But they really are 2 utterly different approaches to making photographs, and I wish there were an embodied system (à la Dynamicland) that brought to the digital photography process the wonderful things from the darkroom process.