Technical Foundation vs. Tradition

I’ve taken to reading a lot of photogrpahy blogs of what I would call serious photographers, although I make money in photography from time to time, which makes me a semi-professional photographer, I would not refer to myself as a serious photographer. I digress. I’ve been reading a lot about how different papers react with different developers, chemicals and other assorted things, and I must confess, even when I was shooting film, I still relied on the lab to get me the results I wanted, this morning “The Online Photographer” had a post metioning the effect of cyan filtration with VC papers and talking about the contrasting techniques of trial and error experimentation of the traditional print method, versus the instantaneous methods using todays digital imaging options of post processing. This brought me to the realisation that I hit every few months of how little I actually know about the traditional print photography thing.

Now having worked in computers for a long time, I’ve come to understand that a good foundation in the basics is a very important thing from a technical perspective, experience in generic networking technologies can mean the difference between a PC engineer with CCNA after his name and a damn great network engineer. The damn great engineer may have no letters, but has a solid foundation in the underlying technologies, the other guy probably only has a 4 day Cisco course under his belt (obviously having a CCNA and being a damn fine network engineer are in no way connected, it’s just an example of experience vs. classroom smarts)

On to my point; I now find myself wondering, by having missed out on the whole self-developer, self-printing, darkroom in the closet thing, if I’m missing some very fundamental foundations that are causing my photgraphy to be less than what it is? How do you go about finding out what fundamentals you are missing out on? How much of the more traditional process technique would many people consider a good base to digital techniques, and how much is obsolete to the digital process?

Difficult questions, I’m happy to listen to anyone that can offer examples of traditional methods that are missing from my repetoire that I might only have gotten from being a “serious” photographer when I would have used film, that might substantially improve my ability to make better digital images now.