I actually put together a Top 10 set of my own on Flickr a few months ago, and Mike’s post motivated me to revise it. Should it go here on Photosensitive.ca?

• Two-Bath Development: Exposure and Development Strategy for Scanning by Sandy King (PDF). This is an article from a back-issue of View Camera magazine in which Sandy King, champion of alternative processes, ultra-large format, and catechol-based developers, describes the advantages of divided developers for hybrid workflows.
• My friend Jon Day-Reiner, formerly of groundglass.ca, has re-joined the photoblog world with 18% Gray, and he’s shooting large-format.
• A list of 40 photography e-magazines – the ones I’ve looked at are quite good.

I remember feeling elated when I discovered this technique. It gives images just a bit of an edge without any hint of that nasty over-sharpened or posterized look. You can use it in pretty much any image-editing software that provides an Unsharp Mask tool. It’s simple and definitely worth trying.

Ansel Adams once said that a B&W negative is like the musical score of a symphony, and the resulting print is the performance. (Adams was actually a highly trained pianist that could have had a career as a professional musician — seriously!) As in music, the raw material present in the negative (or RAW file) is artistically interpreted by the photographer to make a final print that communicates emotionally with the viewer. Dodging and burning are key tools that Adams, and every B&W photographer of note before or since, have used to achieve that goal.

My own photography took a noticeable leap forward when I learned how to dodge and burn effectively — leading the viewer’s eye around the image, emphasizing key elements and diminishing others. A number of books and websites helped with that learning process (which I believe applies equally to film and digital photography) and I’ve listed a few of them here.

• Books by the UK photographer Eddie Ephraums. I learned a lot from his mid-1990s text Creative Elements, which takes the viewer from straight proof prints to finished products, showing how he creates interest and drama. I highly recommend this one, especially to 35mm photographers — almost all of the examples in Creative Elements were shot on 35mm Ilford XP2 Super (a chromogenic-process B&W film that anyone can use).
• Ansel Adams’ Examples, which provides a huge amount of detail on the making of some of his best-known images. The sheer number of individual manipulations he made on some of this work is mind-boggling — Adams definitely had an eye for fine detail.
• The website of contemporary photographer Rolfe Horn. He provides a number of technical examples in the style of Ephraums and Adams, showing how he aligns his darkroom work with his creative goals. (Check out the galleries, too.)

Any more? Add them in the comments!

• Scantips.com — Scantips covers the basics on how scanners work, what the important specifications are, and how to do good basic scanning.
  
• NormanKoren.com — Norman’s site has been providing useful info on film scanning and the digital darkroom for a very long time (it was once one of the only places to get this kind of info on the Web). There are good discussions on scanning and dynamic range.
• Scanning Film Made Easy — from PopPhoto.com. A lengthy article outlining the relative merits of flatbeds and dedicated film scanners; it also addresses some of the technical limitations of scanners.
• Thoughts on Scanning — from Larry Bolch. Larry’s article is aimed at people thinking of scanning a large archive of slides or negatives. He argues that scanning at the maximum resolution isn’t always the best idea, and gives suggestions for streamlining the workflow.
• Getting the Most from Your Scanner — from Paul Butzi. Paul addresses the issue of scanning in grayscale vs. colour using his own equipment. In my own work, I haven’t found that scanning in colour provides any advantage (for B&W negs, of course!) I suspect that every model of scanner is different in this regard.
• The Film Scanning forum — from HybridPhoto.com. There are a LOT of very good discussions here. Have a look through them before asking your own questions.

Any other suggestions? Add them in the comments!

• In the “of local interest” category, a Flickr discussion in the Toronto group looks at where to get medium-format film (with an emphasis on C-41) processed in Toronto these days. Some of the labs that used to be reliable no longer are, whereas others have just plain closed. It’s good to get the “hive” opinion on this once in a while.
• Aaron Muderick comments on doing E-6 at home — he has a more reliable setup than I did when I ran the process in my own bathroom, but his motivation for going the DIY route for colour slides is the same.

… and a question: Are any of my readers (I get 50-100 hits a day, so I know you’re out there!) using Ubuntu Linux for serious digital darkroom work — scanning film, dealing with digital photos, etc.? I like the idea of Ubuntu, but the lack of Photoshop is a killer for me. I am comfortable with GIMP for simple tasks, but find it to have half the features and a quarter of the speed of Photoshop when handling identical tasks. In addition, Picasa crashes all the time under Ubuntu, and I can’t get my scanners to work properly. Any ideas?

• On Photo.net, Rebecca asks the community what advice they wish they had when they started out in photography. A lot of insightful replies, most of which I agree with. (I added my $0.02 as well!)
• On HybridPhoto.com, Keith Williams describes a direct digital-to-B&W process in which he uses an inkjet printer to lay a negative ink image down on unexposed B&W resin-coated photo paper. The ink itself serves as a mask — after exposing the paper to white light, rinsing to remove the ink, then developing and fixing, he gets a B&W “chemical” positive. No inkjet transparency required.