In the mid-1980s, I started shooting and experimenting with color film. The barrier I had with previous to this point was that color film was more expensive to buy and was also considerably more expensive to process. Coming out of art school and choosing a medium that was unfortunately expensive created hard and direct economic choices. Throw in the mix of buying a quality cameras and precision lenses forced me to make decisions for what was immediatley necessary and critical to create images. This equation included using commercial labs to process color film and make color prints. Working with labs was a double-edged problem with working in color as I suffered from the lack of control over the nuanced decisions with the making of color prints. The techs in the darkrooms who processed film and made the prints were always a gamble to work with. I knew what I wanted from my images and I was picky about color saturation, and substrates my work was to be printed on. I eventually built a darkroom that could handle both B+W as well as color cibachrome prints which could capture the rich bold colors I loved to shoot and the ability to control the print to my own expectations.