One local success story is Stepcase, maker of the popular Darkroom and Actioncam photo applications for the iPhone.

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In 1861, professional photographer Auguste-Rosalie Bisson had climbed Mont Blanc with 25 porters hauling his camera and portable darkroom up to the summit.

WSJ: Photographic Balancing Acts | Swiss Alpine Museum | He Cut a Fresh Path in Mountain Photography | By Michael J. Ybarra

This was a professional photograph, with beautifully saturated colors, tonal balancing only a darkroom could achieve, and a composition that bore the mark of a master photographer.

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I'm not advocating cheating, but many of the techniques that even the most basic of software offers equates to what people were doing in the darkroom for years.

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Polaroid, for those too young to have heard of it, is a camera system that produces a picture in a few minutes out the back of the camera, no darkroom required.

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The soldier running in the distance, the graffiti on the crash barrier (something Graham did not see until in the darkroom), the broken lights, the posters placed high on the lamp posts and the flagstones removed from the kerb.

BBC: Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006

Anton Orlov runs the Photo Palace Bus from his base in San Diego, a travelling darkroom project dedicated to this art, and it is this love of the process, as well as the end result, that has led him to not one, but two, magnificent finds.

BBC: Uncovering the past

Through the mastery of double negatives, dodging and burning, and other darkroom deceits, talented photographers including Wanda Wulz and Bill Brandt (whose work is the subject of an upcoming MoMA retrospective) made the medium as unreliably personal as the most fantastical painters had ever achieved on canvas.

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