Darkroom

Once upon a time, people interested in taking a picture used a device known as a camera. Taking pictures was all that this device did. It could never make phone calls. Or play music and video. The pictures were captured on something called film, which came in a roll and had to be inserted into the camera. A certain number of photographs could be taken on each roll, and the used roll had to be removed from the camera to be developed. The development process took time. And chemicals.

Once upon a time, people interested in taking a picture used a device known as a camera. Taking pictures was all that this device did. It could never make phone calls. Or play music and video. The pictures were captured on something called film, which came in a roll and had to be inserted into the camera. A certain number of photographs could be taken on each roll, and the used roll had to be removed from the camera to be developed. The development process took time. And chemicals.

For the past three years, the local beat-makers at Darkroom Productions have brought national attention to Baltimore's hip-hop scene. Now, the duo of Jamal Roberts, 31, and Juan Donovan Bell, 32, is looking to make waves in the movie business. In early March, Bell will move to Los Angeles and open a film office, where he plans to produce feature films and further incorporate Darkroom Productions tracks onto movie soundtracks. It's a natural progression, Bell said. "The move is elementary, really," said Bell, a Baltimore native who still lives here.

For the past three years, the local beat-makers at Darkroom Productions have brought national attention to Baltimore's hip-hop scene. Now, the duo of Jamal Roberts, 31, and Juan Donovan Bell, 32, is looking to make waves in the movie business. In early March, Bell will move to Los Angeles and open a film office, where he plans to produce feature films and further incorporate Darkroom Productions tracks onto movie soundtracks. It's a natural progression, Bell said. "The move is elementary, really," said Bell, a Baltimore native who still lives here.

The group show at Sassafras in Waverly is the gallery's first exhibition devoted solely to photography, which is surely something to celebrate. And it's entirely fitting that the show is entitled Lightroom/Darkroom, a shorthand reference to the digital imaging revolution that is fast replacing traditional chemical processing of films and prints. The Sassafras show features the work of 14 area artists whose disparate styles are held together by the fact that they all love photography and all work in the time-honored medium of black-and-white.

A small space heater flicks on and off inside Deep Flow Studios. Grainy black-and-white security feeds from street-side cameras flash on a TV screen over beat-maker Juan Donovan Bell's left shoulder. Bell sits in an office chair across the room from his musical partner Jamal Roberts, talking hip-hop. Together, Roberts and Bell make up Darkroom Productions, a two-man team that is turning heads in the music industry. This unassuming studio, its confident occupants and the gritty music they make here, embody the South Baltimore surroundings.

In a move that will give local hip-hop composers Darkroom Productions a larger national audience, the duo closed a deal yesterday with MTV Networks to submit music for the coming season of the reality series Rob & Big. The independent production duo of Juan Donovan Bell and Jamal Roberts, who also write music for HBO's The Wire, recently sent about 40 instrumental tracks for use on MTV's Rob & Big. In turn, these tracks can be used on a slew of other...

Buckingham Palace Gardens By Anne Perry The Darkroom of Damocles By Willem Frederik Hermans Overlook / 391 pages / $28 Willem Frederik Hermans was renowned as one of the greatest 20th-century Dutch novelists, but until recently his work was scarcely available in America. Now a new translation of this 1958 novel has landed, and a half-century has not dulled the startling, Camus-like feel of what starts out as a simple tale of following orders during wartime Holland. Henri Osewoudt, a young tobacconist, starts receiving phone calls and missives from a mysterious man calling himself Dorbeck and claiming to be affiliated with British intelligence.

Photo Works, a photographic-arts resource center, opens Saturday in the old U.S. Post Office building at 3531 Chestnut Ave. in Hampden. There will be a reception from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., during which visitors may tour the facility, meet the staff and view the opening photo exhibit, titled "Bread and Butter," which features the work of local photographers Jim Burger, John Dean, Chris Hartlove and Sun photographer Nanine Hartzenbusch. The exhibit explores the relationship between a photographer's personal and professional work.

Laura Weaver could have taken an expensive course on graphic design at a local university, but she wanted to dip her toes in the water - not plunge in head-first. So she enrolled in a class at Photo Works in Hampden's old Post Office building. For 12 nights over four weeks, the Ikea decorator labored in a computer-based, digital imaging lab, learning the basics of graphic design with Adobe Illustrator, Quark XPress and Adobe Photoshop to get a feel for the new medium and decide whether her career should head in a new direction.

The subtle chirps of digital cameras may now be the norm when it comes to photography, but there are still a devoted few who champion the click-whirr of a Polaroid camera. They savor the unpredictability of development and delight in not just the nostalgia, but in the artistry and creativity of instant film. Although the writing has been on the wall for a while that Polaroid would stop making its instant films and cameras, the death of the iconic film has sparked life, inspiration and creativity.

Buckingham Palace Gardens By Anne Perry The Darkroom of Damocles By Willem Frederik Hermans Overlook / 391 pages / $28 Willem Frederik Hermans was renowned as one of the greatest 20th-century Dutch novelists, but until recently his work was scarcely available in America. Now a new translation of this 1958 novel has landed, and a half-century has not dulled the startling, Camus-like feel of what starts out as a simple tale of following orders during wartime Holland. Henri Osewoudt, a young tobacconist, starts receiving phone calls and missives from a mysterious man calling himself Dorbeck and claiming to be affiliated with British intelligence.

In a move that will give local hip-hop composers Darkroom Productions a larger national audience, the duo closed a deal yesterday with MTV Networks to submit music for the coming season of the reality series Rob & Big. The independent production duo of Juan Donovan Bell and Jamal Roberts, who also write music for HBO's The Wire, recently sent about 40 instrumental tracks for use on MTV's Rob & Big. In turn, these tracks can be used on a slew of other...

A small space heater flicks on and off inside Deep Flow Studios. Grainy black-and-white security feeds from street-side cameras flash on a TV screen over beat-maker Juan Donovan Bell's left shoulder. Bell sits in an office chair across the room from his musical partner Jamal Roberts, talking hip-hop. Together, Roberts and Bell make up Darkroom Productions, a two-man team that is turning heads in the music industry. This unassuming studio, its confident occupants and the gritty music they make here, embody the South Baltimore surroundings.

The group show at Sassafras in Waverly is the gallery's first exhibition devoted solely to photography, which is surely something to celebrate. And it's entirely fitting that the show is entitled Lightroom/Darkroom, a shorthand reference to the digital imaging revolution that is fast replacing traditional chemical processing of films and prints. The Sassafras show features the work of 14 area artists whose disparate styles are held together by the fact that they all love photography and all work in the time-honored medium of black-and-white.

For photojournalists charged with gathering images for a daily newspaper, time to pause and reflect is a rarity. When not rushing from one assignment to another, they are in the darkroom (a quaint term in this age of digital cameras and computers) preparing images for the day's paper. Even those shooting in-depth assignments often have to squeeze them in among a daily ration of house fires, board meetings and high school games. With the year's end, though, The Sun's 18 staff photographers took a few moments to reflect.

While Dave McKean exhibits in Gomez Gallery's photo space, the rest of the exhibit area is given over to figurative paintings by Kent Williams and black-and-white photographs by Baltimore photographer Connie Imboden.Though as distinctive as their respective media, these two artists both know how to disorient a viewer.Williams combines pure, painterly passages and photo-based painted images and produces mysterious paintings.In "Early Spring," two women in long black dresses are the center of attention.

For photojournalists charged with gathering images for a daily newspaper, time to pause and reflect is a rarity. When not rushing from one assignment to another, they are in the darkroom (a quaint term in this age of digital cameras and computers) preparing images for the day's paper. Even those shooting in-depth assignments often have to squeeze them in among a daily ration of house fires, board meetings and high school games. With the year's end, though, The Sun's 18 staff photographers took a few moments to reflect.

When a friend's camera died after 20 years of service, he came to me with a question I'm hearing a lot these days: Should he replace Old Faithful with another film camera, or go digital? I wish there were an unequivocal answer. Digital photography has become much cheaper and more convenient over the past three years, and the quality of digital cameras aimed at the sub-$500 consumer market is so good today that it's hard to tell a digital print from an image recorded on film. Digital cameras are still more expensive than equivalent film equipment, but digital imaging has one great cost advantage over the long run - there's no film or traditional processing involved.

Laura Weaver could have taken an expensive course on graphic design at a local university, but she wanted to dip her toes in the water - not plunge in head-first. So she enrolled in a class at Photo Works in Hampden's old Post Office building. For 12 nights over four weeks, the Ikea decorator labored in a computer-based, digital imaging lab, learning the basics of graphic design with Adobe Illustrator, Quark XPress and Adobe Photoshop to get a feel for the new medium and decide whether her career should head in a new direction.