[Leica] Darkroom versus In-camera Creativity was G1 AVAILABLE LIGHT

[nod at bouncing.org (Philip Clarke)]

Victor Rubin wrote:
> Philip Clark wrote:
>
> "A stunning set of images, and an early adopter of the micro four-thirds
> format, do the pictures come out of the camera like this or are they
> worked on ? I see there's some posterisation on the lower left corner of
> the bartender picture, is that an effect of resizing for the web ? I'd
> like to see one of the originals. Reminds me of David Bailey when he
> used to shoot with a Pen F half frame for Olympus (that's a good thing
> IMHO"
>
> Thank you Philip. The fact is these were color images. Because of heavy
> colored lighting in the club, all the images had a severe orange, red or
> purple cast. I'm an old B/W photographer and gave been slowly moving back 
> to
> black/white to satisfy myself. All my images are post processed in
> Photoshop- so these  were part of a natural progression. They were all
> cropped, sharpened to taste (rather like cooking) and adjusted as to
> contrast. Post processing is where I have most of my creative fun. vroger
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
This ties in with the above, who thinks that the darkroom should be a 
creative place rather than a place just to re-balance images ?

I'm historically in two minds, I was a printer first and did all kinds 
of things to the photographer's work, from extreme cropping to touching 
up, to replacing entire areas. I was very much of the opinion that the 
darkroom was where an image was created from a picture. Then I was a 
photographer and I used to take pictures with the express aim of what I 
could then pull out of them in the darkroom.
Now because I have little time to learn how to get extra headroom out of 
a raw (this seems similar to pre-flashing papers as as far as I can tell 
the "print"  is still straight, with no dodging or burning in), I'm now 
taking pictures based on trying to do as little darkroom work as 
possible, so the only thing I want to do in a darkroom is "maybe" burn 
in some highlights, so put much more emphasis on getting the shot right 
first time and not using the darkroom as a safety net.

I cannot decide, should one shoot for the darkroom or shoot for a 
straight print ?

Philip