I've tried to research black and white developing as much as possible before starting in on it, ranging from the writings of Ansel Adams to modern notes from other folks. It turns out that there's a fairly small number of absolute, un-arguable facts, so I decided to just post my personal opinions.
The real reason why full-frame cameras are so popular? Prestige. At the expense of all other possible digital cameras (notably the DMD concept for a camera)
The challenge? Find, buy, or borrow a funky old forgotten camera and run a roll of film through it sometime during the summer.
I've got at least one forgotten camera that would be just perfect for this.
The thing about the people who still shoot 8x10 and 20x24 polaroid film is that they are most likely to be able to put their mouth where their money is when they say they'll pay whatever it takes.
One of the realizations that came with using a lot of the new Web 2.0 services is that if it's easy to deal with, I'll use it. My queue for articles and pictures to post here has been historically far longer than I actually get around to posting because it takes a fairly long sequence of events to actually post things. There's a lot of stuff that is left over from when I created the site in the space of a weekend so that I'd have something to put on my business card that I could hand out at my first gallery showing.
When I was recently in Philly, I ate at Iron Chef Morimoto's restaurant. And proceeded to "food porn" my way through the meal. It's fun, it's participatory, and I didn't use my flash or try to disturb anybody else. And now some other high-end chef wants to ban this practice...
Somebody's writing a documentary about the TFP modeling community, some more thoughts on image theft, and a Leica M8 is shown to be pretty awful for real use in Iraq.