Magical Moments In The Digital Developing Dish

 

When I fell in love with photography sixty years ago, one of the great delights was that magic moment when a print would slowly emerge in the darkroom developing dish. The closest to it these days is seeing a digital image emerge following the application of some complex filtering process. 

This print started life as a tiny, faded sepia image of a paddle steamer at sea off the coast of Herne bay in 1925. Interesting, but not necessarily stunning. Tidy the image up, get rid of the scratches and the blotches, add some colour - and what emerges from the digital developing dish was something quite different, something a little magical.