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Garry Black Photography

Question:

Hi Gary, Your question and answer pages are very helpful. Thanks so much for making the info available and taking the time.

My question. As a semi professional photographer, looking to move into the business more fully, I realize the need to purchase a computer system to alter and store some of my 35mm transparency files. Can you recommend a good computer system to start out with for a digital darkroom? I still plan to use traditional film.

Answer:

I started using Adobe Photoshop 4.0 in 1997. The computer that I bought then was a Dell PC Pentium II at 266 with 64MB of ram and a 6.4G hard drive and a 100MB Zip Drive and a 17" Trinitron monitor and a 16MB video card. It is still the computer that I use today, last spring I bought another 128MB of ram to decrease some of the time with large files. This fall I bought a CD-R to store the images that I had altered as cd's are much cheaper than the Zip cartridges. I also bought the Nikon LS-2000 scanner. works just fine, except when I start working with a file size greater than 100Mb it really slows down. Last week I was working with an image and because of all of the layers that I had the file size was around 250MB, it took 15 minutes just to open the image.

UPDATED - October 2001

I have upgraded (or updated) my computer system. I now have a Dell 8200 PC Pentium 4 at 1.8 with 512MB of ram, 40G hard drive, 250MB Zip Drive, CD-RW, 19" Trinitron monitor with a 64MB video card. I traded in the Nikon LS-2000 scanner for the Nikon "Super Coolscan 4000". I am now using Photoshop 6.0

Most of the pictures that I alter using Photoshop are studio/concept images which just can't be created with the camera. I have "fixed up" some landscape images, removing telephone wires and poles or fixing film lab processing flaws on old slides (that is one of the reasons why we do our own slide processing now).