I enjoyed printing under an enlarger, working in an amber safelight–lit darkroom while listening to music, maybe Gershwin, and trying figure out if more contrast might help a particular cause or if I could coax some detail from a murky shadow. But I was never mistaken for being a Walker Evans darkroom-kind-of-guy. However, I would go the extra yard when I was printing on Agfa Portriga-Rapid photo paper.

Portriga was this beautiful, warm-toned, double weight, graded paper with wondrous blacks. It was amazing stuff and certainly worth the price, about $70 for a box of 100 sheets. Using it made me want to be a better printer, even though my inspiration was often undone by my execution.

I recently went through some photos I’ve taken of people here in Pueblo—some famous, most famous for only a day—over the past 10 years or so, converting them to black & white in Photoshop then toning them with a firm nod to Portriga-Rapid. For the most part, newspapers frown upon the practice of deviating beyond a simple grayscale conversion, save for some dodging and burning (which I’m in accordance with, by the way). But now free of having to adhere to that policy, it was a fun to see what might have been and trying to recapture some of that alchemy that took place in the darkroom seemingly eons ago.