[Photo Engineer]

"If the question begins with the word 'why', the answer is money" -- Robert A. Heinlein (in the voice of Lazarus Long).

If your workshop were being held locally to me, I still wouldn't be able to afford to attend. I'd love to learn all there is to know about emulsion making, but if the cost of admission is more than I can pay, I'll have to remain ignorant, and either reinvent the stuff for myself when the time comes or learn it the way people learn wet plate now -- they aren't going to stop making glass any time soon, and if I can coat glass, I can do what I need.

Meantime, I do the only thing I can do -- use and buy film and paper from the companies that appear committed to trying to keep the process alive on an industrial scale.

Donald, I can see your logic but I cannot agree completely.

Look at all of the posts about pt/pd and other alternative methods of photography and look at all of the workshops on these subjects. People are out there paying as much or more to make pt/pd prints than they would to make AgX prints.

Silver halide in gelatin is far more flexible, more useful and certainly has its own beauty as an art form. The photographic speed and curve shape variations are almost endless.

Yet, look at the dearth of workshops on silver gelatin and look at the lack in the number of those interested in it, when, OTOH almost all of us use it in-camera!

That seems to confound your argument to some extent and I cannot fully understand the situation out there. Things just don't add up completely. AgX is easy to make, repeatable, easy to coat and fast in speed. It will become a lost art if not learned well by some of the people out there.

I guess no one will truly miss it until it is gone.

PE